METHODS OF AUTHORS 



ERICHSEN 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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Sllclf....L&.i. 



UNITED STATES OE AMERICA. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS 



BY / 

DR. HUGO ERICHSEN 

Author of "Medical Rhymes," "The Cremation of the 
Dead," "The Rose in Poetry," Etc. 









BOSTON: 

THE WRITER PUBLISHING COMPANY 

282 Washington Street 

1894 



TfV r3 



Copyright, 1894, 
By WILLIAM H. HILLS. 



All Rights Reserved. 



To 

R. E. FRANCILLON, 

who is admired and loved by novel-readers on both 
sides of the Atlantic, 

This Book is Dedicated, 

by his permission, with sincere regard, by 
the Author. 



PREFACE. 



When I began to gather the material for this 
volume I was quite doubtful as to whether the 
public would be interested in a work of this kind 
or not. As my labor progressed, however, it 
became evident that not only the body of the 
people, but authors themselves, were deeply 
interested in the subject, and would welcome 
a book treating of it. Not only M. Jules 
Claretie, the celebrated Parisian literarian, but 
the late Dr. Meissner and many others assured 
me of this fact. 

Nor is this very surprising. Who, after read- 
ing a brilliant novel, or some excellent treatise, 
would not like to know how it was written ? 

So far as I know, this volume is a novelty, 
and Ben Akiba is outwitted for once. Books 
about authors have been published by the thou- 
sands, but to my knowledge, up to date, none 
have been issued describing their methods of 
work. 

In the preparation of this book I have been 
greatly aided by the works of Rev. Francis 
Jacox, an anonymous article in All the Year 
Round, and R. E. Francillon's essay on " The 



VI PREFACE. 

Physiology of Authorship," which appeared 
first in the Gentleman 's Magazine, 

I was also assisted in my labor by numerous 
newspaper clippings and many letters from 
writers, whose names appear in this volume, 
and to all of whom I return my sincere thanks. 

H. E. 
Detroit, Mich. 



^nf^ 



CONTENTS. 



I. Eccentricities in Composition. 

II. Care in Literary Production. 

III. Speed in Writing. 

IV. Influence upon Writers of Time and 

Place. 

V. Writing under Difficulties. 

VI. Aids to Inspiration — Favorite Habits 
of Work. 

VII. Goethe, Dickens, Schiller, and Scott. 

VIII. Burning Midnight Oil. 

IX. Literary Partnership. 

X. Anonymity in Authorship. 

XL System in Novel Writing. 

XII. Traits of Musical Composers. 

XIII. The Hygiene of Writing. 

XIV. A Humorist's Regimen. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 



I. 

Eccentricities in Composition. 

The public — that is, the reading world made 
up of those who love the products of author- 
ship — always takes an interest in the methods 
of work adopted by literary men, and is fond of 
gaining information about authorship in the act, 
and of getting a glimpse of its favorite, the 
author, at work in that " sanctum sanctorum " — 
the study. The modes in which men write are 
so various that it would take at least a dozen 
volumes to relate them, were they all known, 
for : — 

" Some wits are only in the mind 

When beaux and belles are 'round them prating ; 
Some, when they dress for dinner, find 

Their muse and valet both in waiting : 
And manage, at the self-same time, 
To adjust a neckcloth and a rhyme. 

" Some bards there are who cannot scribble 
Without a glove to tear or nibble ; 

J 



10 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

Or a small twig to whisk about — 

As if the hidden founts of fancy, 
Like wells of old, were thus found out 

By mystic tricks of rhabdomancy. 

Such was the little feathery wand, 

That, held forever in the hand 

Of her who won and wore the crown 

Of female genius in this age, 
Seemed the conductor that drew down 

Those words of lightning to her page." 

This refers to Madame de Stael, who, when 
writing, wielded a " little feathery wand," made 
of paper, shaped like a fan or feather, in the 
manner and to the effect above described. 

Well may the vivacious penman of " Rhymes 
on the Road " exclaim : — 

" What various attitudes, and ways, 

And tricks we authors have in writing ! 
While some write sitting, some, like Bayes, 

Usually stand while they're inditing. 
Poets there are who wear the floor out, 

Measuring a line at every stride ; 
While some, like Henry Stephens, pour out 

Rhymes by the dozen white they ride. 
Herodotus wrote most in bed ; 

And Richerand, a French physician, 
Dec 1 ares the clockwork of the head 

Goes best in that reclined position. 
If you consult Montaigne and Pliny on 
The subject, 'tis their joint opinion 
That thought its richest harvest yields 
Abroad, among the woods and fields." 

M. de Valois alleges that Plato produced, 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. II 

like Herodotus, "his glorious visions all in 
bed " ; while 

" 'Twas in his carriage the sublime 

Sir Richard Blackmore used to rhyme." 

But little is known of the habits of the earli- 
est writers. The great Plato, whose thoughts 
seemed to come so easy, we are told, toiled 
over his manuscripts, working with slow and 
tiresome elaboration. The opening sentence of 
" The Republic " on the author's tablets was 
found to be written in thirteen different 
versions. When death called him from his 
labor the great philosopher was busy at his 
desk, " combing, and curling, and weaving, and 
unweaving his writings after a variety of fash- 
ions." Virgil was wont to pour forth a quan- 
tity of verses in the morning, which he 
decreased to a very small number by incessant 
correction and elimination. He subjected the 
products of his composition to a process of 
continual polishing and filing, much after the 
manner, as he said himself, of a bear licking 
her cubs into shape. Cicero's chief pleasure 
was literary work. He declared that he would 
willingly forego all the wealth and glory of the 
world to spend his time in meditation or study. 

The diversity in the methods adopted by 
authors is as great as the difference in their 
choice of subjects. A story is often cited in 



12 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

illustration of the different characteristics of 
three great nationalities which equally illus- 
trates the different paths which may be followed 
in any intellectual undertaking. 

An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Ger- 
man, competing for a prize offered for the best 
essay on the natural history of the camel, 
adopted each his own method of research upon 
the subject. The German, providing himself 
with a stock of tobacco, sought the quiet soli- 
tude of his study in order to evolve from the 
depths of his philosophic consciousness the 
primitive notion of a camel. The Frenchman 
repaired to the nearest library, and overhauled 
its contents in order to collect all that other 
men had written upon the subject. The Eng- 
lishman packed his carpet-bag and set sail for 
the East, that he might study the habits of the 
animal in its original haunts. 

The combination of these three methods is 
the perfection of study ; but the Frenchman's 
method is not unknown even among Americans. 
Nor does it deserve the condemnation it usually 
receives. The man who peruses a hundred 
books on a subject for the purpose of writing 
one bestows a real benefit upon society, in case 
he does his work well. But some excellent 
work has been composed without the necessity 
either of research or original investigation. 
Anthony Trollope described his famous arch- 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 13 

deacon without ever having met a live archdea- 
con. He never lived in any cathedral city except 
London ; Archdeacon Grantly was the child of 
" moral consciousness " alone ; Trollope had no 
knowledge, except indirectly, about bishops and 
deans. In fact, " The Warden " was not intended 
originally to be a novel of clerical life, but a 
novel which should work out a dramatic situa- 
tion — that of a trustworthy, amiable man who 
was the holder, by no fault of his own, of an en- 
dowment which was in itself an abuse, and on 
whose devoted head should fall the thunders 
of those who assailed the abuse. 

Bryan Waller Proctgr, the poet ( who, I be- 
lieve, is better known under the name of " Barry 
Cornwall " ), had never viewed the ocean when 
he committed to paper that beautiful poem, 
" The Sea." Many of his finest lyrics and 
songs were composed mentally while he was 
riding daily to London in an omnibus. Schiller 
had never been in Switzerland, and had only 
heard and read about the country, when he 
wrote his " William Tell." Harrison Ains- 
worth, the Lancashire novelist, when he com- 
posed " Rookwood " and " Jack Sheppard," de- 
pended entirely on his ability to read up and 
on his facility of assimilation, for during his 
lifetime he never came in personal contact with 
thieves at all. It is said that when he wrote the 
really admirable ride of Turpin to York he 



14 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

' only went at a great pace over the paper, with a 
road-map and description of the country in front* 
of him. It was only when he heard all the 
.world say how faithfully the region was pictured, 
and how truly he had observed distances and 
localities, that he actually drove over the ground 
for the first time, and declared that it was more 
like his account than he could have imagined. 

Erasmus composed on horseback, as he 
pricked across the country, and committed his 
thoughts to paper as soon as he reached his 
next inn. In this way he composed his " En- 
comium Moriae," or " Praise of Folly," in a 
journey from Italy to the land of the man to 
whose name that title bore punning and com- 
plimentary reference, his sterling friend and 
ally, Sir Thomas More. 

Aubrey relates how Hobbes composed his 
" Leviathan ": " He walked much and mused as 
he walked ; and he had in the head of his cane a 
pen and inkhorn, and he carried always a note- 
book in his pocket, and ' as soon as the thought 
darted,' he presently entered it into his book, or 
otherwise might have lost it. He had drawn 
the design of the book into chapters, etc., and 
he knew whereabouts it would come in." 
Hartley Coleridge somewhere expresses his 
entire conviction that it was Pope's general 
practice to set down in a book every line, half- 
line, or lucky phrase that occurred to him, and 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 5 

either to find or make a place for them when 
and where he could. Richard Savage noted down 
a whole tragedy on scraps of paper at the coun- 
ters of shops, into which he entered and asked 
for pen and ink as if to make a memorandum. 

" A man would do well to carry a pencil in 
his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the 
moment. Those that come unsought are gen- 
erally the most valuable, and should be secured, 
because they seldom return." This was the 
advice of Lord Bacon, whose example has been 
followed by many eminent men. Miss Mar- 
ti neau has recorded that Barry Cornwall's 
favorite method of composition was practised 
when alone in a crowd. He, like Savage, also 
had a habit of running into a shop to write 
down his verses. Tom Moore's custom was to 
compose as he walked. He had a table in his 
garden, on which he wrote down his thoughts. 
When the weather was bad, he paced up and 
down his small study. It is extremely desir- 
able that thoughts should be written as they 
rise in the mind, because, if they are not re- 
corded at the time, they may never return. " I 
attach so much importance to the ideas which 
come during the night, or in the morning,'-' says 
Gaston Plante, the electrical engineer, " that I 
have always, at the head of my bed, paper and 
pencil suspended by a string, by the help of 
which I write every morning the ideas I have 



1 6 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

been able to conceive, particularly upon sub- 
jects of scientific research. I write these notes 
in obscurity, and decipher and develop them 
in the morning, pen in hand." The philoso- 
pher Emerson took similar pains to catch a 
fleeting thought, for, whenever he had a happy 
idea, he wrote it down, and when Mrs. Emer- 
son, startled in the night by some unusual 
sound, cried, "What is the matter? Are you 
ill?" the philosopher softly replied, "No, my 
dear ; only an idea." 

George Bancroft, the historian, had a similar 
habit. His bedroom served also as a library. 
The room was spacious, and its walls were lined, 
above and below, with volumes. A single bed 
stood in the middle of the apartment, and beside 
the bed were paper, pencil, two wax candles, and 
matches ; so that, like Mr. Pecksniff, Mr. Ban- 
croft might not forget any idea that came into 
his mind in a wakeful moment of the night. 

As curious a mode of composition as per- 
haps any on record, if the story be credible, is 
that affirmed of Fuller — that he used to write 
the first words of every line near the margin 
down to the foot of the paper, and that then, 
beginning again, he filled up the blanks ex- 
actly, without spaces, interlineations, or con- 
tractions, and that he would so connect the 
ends and beginnings that the sense would 
appear as complete as if it had been written in 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 7 

a continued series after the ordinary manner. 

Several distinguished American writers have 
the habit of jotting a sentence, or a line or two 
here and there, upon a long page, and then fill- 
ing up the outline thus made with persistent 
revision. 

With some great writers, it has been custo- 
mary to do a vast amount of antecedent work be- 
fore beginning their books. It is related of 
George Eliot that she read one thousand 
books before she wrote " Daniel Deronda." 
For two or three years before she composed a 
work, she read up her subject in scores and 
scores of volumes. She was one of the mas- 
ters, so called, of all learning, talking with 
scholars and men of science on terms of equal- 
ity. George Eliot was a hard worker, and, like 
many gifted writers, she was often tempted to 
burn at night the lines she had written during 
the day. Carlyle was similarly tempted, and it 
is to be regretted that the great growler, in 
many instances, did not carry out the design. 
Carlyle spent fifteen years on his " Frederick 
the Great." Alison perused two thousand 
books before he completed his celebrated his- 
tory. It is said of another that he read twenty 
thousand volumes and wrote only two books. 
" For the statistics of the negro population of 
South America alone," says Robert Dale 
Owen, "I examined more than 150 volumes." 



15 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

David Livingstone said : " Those who have never 
carried a book through the press can form no 
idea of the amount of toil it involves. The 
process has increased my respect for authors a 
thousandfold. I think I would rather cross the 
African continent again than to undertake to 
write another book." 

Thackeray confessed that the title for his 
novel, " Vanity Fair/' came to him in the mid- 
dle of the night, and that he jumped out of bed 
and ran three times around the room, shouting 
the words. Thackeray had no literary system. 
He wrote only when he felt like it. Sometimes 
he was unable to write two lines in succession. 
Then, again, he could sit down and write so 
rapidly that he would keep three sheets in the 
wind all the time. While he was editor of the 
Cornhill Magazine he never succeeded in get- 
ting copy enough ahead for more than five 
issues. In this negligence he fell far behind the 
magazine editors of the present time. They 
always have bundles of copy on hand. 



II. 

Care in Literary Production. 

Indolence, that is to say, chronic fatigue, ap- 
pears to be the natural habit of imaginative 
brains. It is a commonplace to note that men 
of fertile fancy, as a class, have been notorious 
for their horror of formulating their ideas even 
by the toil of thought, much more by passing 
them through the crucible of the ink-bottle. In 
many cases they have needed the very active 
stimulant of hunger. The cacoethes scribendi 
is a disease common, not to imaginative, but 
to imitative, minds. Probably no hewer of wood 
or drawer of water undergoes a tithe of the toil 
of those whose work is reputed play, but is, in 
fact, a battle, every moment, between the flesh 
and the spirit. Campbell, who at the age of 
sixty-one could drudge at an unimaginative 
work for fourteen hours a day like a galley- 
slave, "and yet," as he says in' one of his letters, 
" be as cheerful as a child," speaks in a much 
less happy tone of the work which alone was 
congenial to him : " The truth is, I am not 
writing poetry, but projecting it, and that keeps 
me more idle and abstracted than you can con- 
ceive. I pass hours thinking about what I am 
to compose. The actual time employed in com- 



20 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

position is but a fraction of the time lost in 
setting about it." " At Glasgow," we read of 
him even when a young man, " he seldom exer- 
cised his gift except when roused into action 
either by the prospect of gaining a prize or by 
some striking incident." Campbell, if not a 
great man, was a typical worker. 

A playwright, who had written five hundred 
lines in three days, taunted Euripides because 
he had spent as much time upon five lines. 
" Yes," replied the poet, " but your fivo. hun- 
dred lines in three days will be forgotten, while 
my five will live forever." 

It is said of one of Longfellow's poems that 
it was written in four weeks, but that he spent 
six months in correcting and cutting it down. 
Longfellow was a very careful writer. He 
wrote and rewrote, and laid his work by and 
later revised it. He often consulted his friends 
about his productions before they were given 
to the world. Thus he sent his work out as 
perfect as great care and a brilliant intellect 
could make it. The poet's pleasant surround- 
ings must have acted as a stimulus upon his 
mind. His library was a long room in the 
northeastern corner of the lower floor in the 
so-called Craigie House, once the residence of 
General Washington. It was walled with 
handsome bookcases, rich in choice works. 
The poet's usual seat here was at a little high 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 21 

table by the north window, looking upon the 
garden. Some of his work was done while he 
was standing at this table, which reached then 
to his breast. 

Emerson wrote with great care, and would 
not only revise hi,s manuscript carefully, but 
frequently rewrite the article upon the proof- 
sheets. 

John Owen was twenty years on his " Com- 
mentary on the Epistle of the Hebrews." 

The celebrated French critic, Sainte-Beuve, 
was accustomed to devote six days to the prep- 
aration of a single one of his weekly articles. 
A large portion of his time was passed in the re- 
tirement of his chamber, to which, on such occa- 
sions, no one — with the exception of his favor- 
ite servant — was allowed to enter under any 
circumstances whatever. Here he wrote those 
critical papers which carried captive the heart 
of France, and filled with wonder cultivated 
minds everywhere. 

The historian Gibbon, in speakingof the man- 
ner in which he wrote his " Decline and Fall of 
the Roman Empire," said : " Many experiments 
were made before I could hit the middle tone 
between a dull tone and a rhetorical declama- 
tion. Three times did I compose the first chap- 
ter, and twice the second and third, before I 
was tolerably satisfied with their effect." Gib- 
bon spent twenty years on his immortal book 



22 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

Lamb toiled most laboriously over his essays. 
These papers, which long ago took their place 
in the English classical language and which 
are replete with the most delicate fancies, were 
composed with the most exacting nicety, yet 
their author is regarded the world over as pos- 
sessed of genius of a high order. JX^ 

La Rochefoucauld was occupied for the space 
of fifteen years in preparing for publication his 
little work called " Maximes," rewriting many 
of them more than thirty times. 

Honore de Balzac had just completed his 
teens when he arrived in Paris, and till 1830, 
some nine years, he lived, not in a garret, but 
in the apartment over that, called a grenier j 
his daily expenses amounted to about half a 
franc — three sous for bread, three for milk, 
and the rest for firewood and candles. He 
passed his days in the public library of the 
Arsenal, devouring books. In the evening he 
transcribed his notes, and during the nights he 
took his walks abroad, and so gained an insight 
into the depths of human depravity. 

After his first novel, in 1830, he commenced 
earning money. Balzac, who had the disease 
of creative genius in its most outrageous form, 
" preached to us," says The*ophile Gautier, " the 
strangest hygiene ever propounded among lay- 
men. If we desired to hand our names down to 
posterity as authors, it was indispensable that 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 23 

we should immure ourselves absolutely for two 
or three years ; that we should drink nothing 
but water, and eat only soaked beans, like 
Protogenes ; that we should go to bed at sunset 
and rise at midnight, to work hard till morning ; 
that we should spend the whole day in revising, 
amending, extending, pruning, perfecting, and 
polishing our night's work, in correcting proofs 
or taking notes, or in other necessary study." 
If the author happened to be in love, he was 
to see the lady of his heart only for one half- 
hour a year, but he might write to her, for the 
cold-blooded reason that letter-writing improves 
the style. Not only did Balzac preach this 
austere doctrine, but he practised it as nearly 
as he could without ceasing altogether to be a 
man and a Frenchman. Leon Gozlan's ac- 
count of the daily life of the author of the 
" Comedie Humaine " has often been quoted. 
On the average he worked eighteen hours a 
day. He began his day with dinner at six in 
the afternoon, at which, while he fed his friends 
generously, he himself ate little besides fruit 
and drank nothing but water. At seven o'clock 
he wished his friends good-night, and went to 
bed. At midnight he rose and worked — till 
dinner-time next day : and so the world went 
round. George Sand calls him, " Drunk on 
water, intemperate in work, and sober in all 
other passions." Jules Janin asks, " Where has 



24 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

M. de Balzac gained his knowledge of woman — 
he, the anchorite?" As it was, love and death 
came to him hand-in-hand. He married a 
wealthy Polish lady in 1848. They travelled 
over the battlefields of Europe, to collect notes 
for a work, and then settled down in a luxurious 
mansion in the Champs Elysees. Nothing was 
wanting in that palatial residence, for every 
fancy of Balzac had been gratified. Three 
months after the house-warming Balzac was 
dead. 

Balzac, after he had made a plan of a novel, 
and had, after the most laborious research, 
gathered together the materials which he was to 
embody in it, locked himself in his private apart- 
ment, shut out all the light of day, and then, by 
the aid of his study lamp, he toiled day and 
night. His servants, knowing so well his pe- 
culiar habits, brought him food and drink. 
Finally, with his task completed, as he thought, 
he came forth from his retirement looking more 
dead than alive. But invariably his task was 
not altogether satisfactory to him, after all, for 
again he would seek the seclusion of his cham- 
ber to rearrange and make more perfect that 
which he had before supposed wholly complete. 
Then, too, when his work was in the hands of 
the printer, he was as apt as not to alter, in one 
way and another, the manuscript, until both 
printer and publisher were on the verge of de- 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 25 

spair. He corrected up to as many as twelve 
proofs, and many of his "corrections " consisted 
in rewriting whole pages. What " copy " he 
must have produced during the twenty years 
in which he brought out ninety-seven volumes ! 
Like Voltaire, Balzac had a passion for coffee, 
more to keep him awake than as a stimulant. 
That beverage shortened his life, which ended 
by hypertrophy of the heart. When he sat 
down to his desk, his servant, who regarded a 
man that abstained even from tobacco as 
scarcely human, used to place coffee within 
reach, and upon this he worked till his full 
brain would drive his starved and almost sleep- 
less body into such forgetfulness that he often 
found himself at daybreak bareheaded, in dress- 
ing gown and slippers, in the Place du Carrou- 
sel, not knowing how he came there, miles 
away from home. Now, coffee acts upon some 
temperaments as laudanum acts upon others, and 
many of the manners and customs of Balzac 
were those of a confirmed opium-eater. He had 
the same strange illusions, the same extravagant 
ideas, the same incapacity for distinguishing 
with regard to outward things, between the pos- 
sible and the impossible, the false and the true. 
His midnight wanderings, his facility in pro- 
jecting himself into personalities utterly unlike 
his own, belong to the experiences of the " Eng- 
lish Opium-eater." 



26 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

Kinglake's beautiful " Eothen " was rewrit- 
ten half a dozen times before it was given to a 
publisher. 

Tennyson's song, " Come Into the Garden, 
Maud," was rewritten some fifty times before 
it gave complete satisfaction to the author. 

Coming to the gifted Addison, whose diction 
is full of such grace and simplicity, so much so 
as to create envy, yet admiration, in the mind 
of every writer who has flourished since his 
day, we find that the great author wrote with 
the most painful deliberation. It is narrated 
that the press was stopped again and again, 
after a whole edition of the Spectator had been 
thrown off, in order that its author might make 
a slight change in a sentence. 

Tom Moore, with all his wonderful brilliancy, 
considered it doing very well if he wrote fifty 
lines of his " Lalla Rookh " in a week/> 

Hawthorne was slow in composing. Some- 
times he wrote only what amounted to half a 
dozen pages a week, often only a few lines in 
the same space of time, and, alas ! he frequently 
went to his chamber and took up his pen, only 
to find himself wholly unable to perform any 
literary work. 

The author of " Pleasures of Hope " was 
slow of thought, and consequently his mode of 
composition was toilsome in the highest degree. 
He wrote with extreme caution, weighing 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 27 

and shaping the effect of each particular line 
before he permitted it to stand. 

Bret Harte, whose creations read as if they 
had come from his brain without a flaw or hin- 
drance, showing brilliancy of thought witfi the 
grace of the artist, is still another writer who 
passes days and weeks on a short story or poem 
before he is ready to deliver it into the hands 
of the printer. So it was with Bryant. Though 
in reality the sum total of his poetry might be 
included in a small volume, so few are his 
lyrics, we cannot fail to be impressed with the 
truth of the statement when we are told that 
even these few gems of verse cost our late 
Wordsworth hard toil to bring into being, and 
endow with the splendor of immortality. 

Bernardine de St. Pierre copied his sweet and 
beautiful " Paul and Virginia " nine times to 
make it more perfect. 

Beranger composait toutes ses chansons dans 
sa tite. "Once made, I committed them to 
writing in order to forget them," he said. He 
tells of having dreamt for ten years of a song 
about the taxes that weigh down the rural popu- 
lation. In vain he tapped his brain-pan, — 
nothing came of it. But one night he awoke 
with the air and the refrain tout trouves : 

" Jacques, leve-toi ; 
Voici venir l'huissier du roi " ; 

and in a day or two the song was a made thing. 
The laborious pains bestowed by Alfleri on 



28 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

the process of composition may seem at first 
sight hard to reconcile with his impulsive char- 
acter. If he approved his first sketch of a 
piece, — after laying it by for some time, not 
approaching it again until his mind was free 
of the subject, — he submitted it to what he 
called "development," i. e., writing out in prose 
the indicated scenes, with all the force at his 
command, but without stopping to analyze a 
thought or correct an expression. " He then 
proceeded to versify at his leisure the prose he 
had written, selecting with care the ideas he 
thought best, and rejecting those which he 
deemed " unworthy of a place. Nor did he ever 
yet regard this work as finished, but "inces- 
santly polished it verse by verse and made con- 
tinual alterations," as might seem to him ex- 
pedient. 

Hartley Coleridge so far resembled Alfieri 
that it was his custom fo put aside what he had 
written for some months, till the heat and ex- 
citement of composition had effervesced, and 
then he thought it was in a fair condition to 
criticise. But he seldom altered. " Strike 
the nail on the anvil," was his advice ; he never 
" kneaded or pounded " his thoughts, which 
have been described as always coming out cap-a- 
pie, like a troop in quick march. He used to 
brandish his pen in the act of composition, 
now and then beating time with his foot, and 
breaking out into a shout at any felicitous idea. 



III. 

Speed in Writing. 

Dr. Johnson was a very rapid writer. A mod- 
ern critic says of him : " He had but to dip 
his pen in ink, and there flowed oat a current 
of thought and language wide and voluminous 
as the Ganges in flood." Some of the best 
papers in the Rambler were written " currente 
calamo" Johnson struck off his Ramblers and 
Idlers at a heat when the summons of the press 
forbade his indolence to put off his work 
another moment : he did not give' himself even 
a minute to read over his papers before they 
went to the printers. Often he sent a portion 
of the copy of an essay, and wrote the remain- 
der while the earlier part was printing. His 
" Life of Savage " was dashed off at one sitting. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds was so fascinated with this 
eloquent and touching narrative, that he could 
not lay it down until he had finished it. John- 
son would not have written " Rasselas " except 
for the necessity of paying the costs of his 
mother's funeral. He was an extremely indo- 
lent man, and yet he was a laborious worker 
where the imagination was not concerned. Af- 
ter spending the evening at the literary club in 
the society of Burke, Goldsmith, and other 



30 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

friends, he returned home between midnight 
and sunrise, went to bed, and was seldom seen 
before noon. Bennet Langton was so delighted 
with the Ratnbler, that he went to London to 
be introduced to Johnson. He called upon him 
about twelve o'clock, but the great doctor was 
not yet visible. After waiting some time, the 
author of the Rambler made his appearance. 
The visitor expected to see a neatly dressed 
philosopher, but, instead, a huge, uncouth figure 
rolled into the room in a soiled morning-g^wn, 
with an ill-arranged wig, and stockings falling 
over his shoes. 

The elder Dumas, in order to get any work 
done at all, had to forbid himself, by an effort 
of will, to leave his desk before a certain num- 
ber of pages were written. Victor Hugo is said 
to have locked up his clothes while writing 
" Notre-Dame," so that he might not escape 
from it till the last word was written. In such 
cases the so-called "pleasures of imagination" 
look singularly like the pains of stone-breaking. 
The hardest part of the lot of genius, we sus- 
pect, has been not the emotional troubles pop- 
ularly — and with absurd exaggeration — as- 
cribed to it, but a disgust for labor during the 
activity of the fancy, and the necessity for labor 
when it is most disgusting. 

Victor Hugo composed with wonderful rapid- 
ity. He wrote his " Cromwell " in three months, 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 31 

and his " Notre Dame de Paris " in four months 
and a half. But even these have been his long- 
est periods of labor, and as he grew older he 
wrote faster. "Marion Delorme " was finished 
in twenty-four days, " Hernani " in twenty-six, 
and " Le Roi s'amuse " in twenty. Although 
the poet wrote very quickly, he often corrected 
laboriously. He rarely rewrote. Mme. Drouet, 
who was his literary secretary for thirty 
years, copied all his manuscripts. Otherwise 
the printers would have found him one of the 
most difficult authors to put into type. Mme. 
Drouet saved them much worry, and himself or 
his publishers much expense in the way of com- 
position. She also assisted in the correction of 
the proofs. He generall) had several works in 
the stocks at the same time. Hugo considered 
a change of subject a recreation. He would go 
from poetry to fiction, from fiction to history, 
according to his mood. As a rule, he rose at 
six o'clock in the morning, took a cold bath, 
then took a raw egg and a cup of black coffee, 
and went to work. He never sat down to write, 
but stood at a high desk, and refreshed himself 
by an occasional turn across the room, and a sip 
of eau sucree. He breakfasted at eleven. One 
of his recreations was riding on the top of an 
omnibus, a habit he contracted during a short 
visit to London, when he was advised that " the 
knife-board" was a good place from which to 



32 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

see the street life of the English metropolis. 
The "knife-board," indeed, was his favorite point 
of observation, whence he gathered inspiration 
from the passing crowds below. Many of his 
famous characters have been caught in his 
mind's eye while taking a three-sou drive from 
the Arc de Triomphe to the Bastile. 

It is on record that Bulwer wrote his ro- 
mance of" Harold " in less than a month, resting 
not at all by day, and scarcely at night. In a 
private letter Lord Lytton says : " The novel 
of ' Harold ' was written in rather less than 
four weeks. I can personally attest this fact, 
as 1 was with my father when he wrote it — on 
a visit to his friend, the late Mr. Tennyson 
D'Eyncourt. D'Eyncourt was a great collector 
of Norman and Anglo-Saxon chronicles, with 
which his library was well stored. The notes 
of research for ' Harold ' fill several thick com- 
monplace books. . . . While my father was 
writing ' Harold ' I do not think he put 
down his pen except for meals and half an 
hour's run before dinner 'round the terrace. 
He was at work the greater part of every night, 
and again early in the morning." 

It is an interesting fact in regard to Lord 
Tennyson's drama on the same subject — with 
a dedication to the late Lord Lytton, in 
reconciliation of an old literary feud with his 
father — that the first sketch of " Harold " took 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 33 

the form of a drama, entitled "William the 
Norman." It was probably not written for 
publication, rs the writer's way of composing 
many of his prose romances was to sketch them 
out first as dramas. 

The "Lady of Lyons" was written in ten 
days. It was by no means uncommon with 
Bulwer to have two books in hand at once, and 
live alternate periods with the beings of his 
creation, as if he were passing in society from 
one company to another. Thus " Lucretia " 
and " The Caxtons," " Kenelm Chillingly " and 
"The Parisians," were written simultaneously. 
But despite his literary facility, Bulwer rewrote 
some of his briefer productions as many as 
eight or nine times before their publication. 
Another author tells us that he wrote paragraphs 
and whole pages of his book as many as fifty 
times. 

Byron wrote the " Bride of Abydos " in a 
single night, and the quill pen with which he 
performed this marvellous feat is still preserved 
in the British Museum. 

Dryden wrote " Alexander's Feast " in two 
days. 

" The Merry Wives of Windsor " was com- 
posed in a fortnight. 

Becklord finished " Yathek " in two days and 
nights. 

Henry Ward Beecher's publishers have fa- 



34 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

vored the world with an account of his habits 
in composition. " He wrote," they tell us, 
" with inconceivable rapidity, in a large, sprawl- 
ing hand, lines wide apart, and words so thinly 
scattered about that some of the pages remind 
one of the famous description of a page of Na- 
poleon's manuscript — a scratch, a blot, and a 
splutter." This is, indeed, remarkable, but is 
far exceeded by the performance in that line of 
a famous Chinese novelist, who wrote with such 
fearful speed, that, throwing the finished sheets 
over his head, they soon accumulated to a pile 
large enough to darken his windows, and 
threaten him with suffocation. 

Horace, in one of his satires, makes fun of a 
contemporary poet, whose chief claim to dis- 
tinction was that he could compose two hun- 
dred verses standing on one leg. Horace did 
not think much of the verses, and, we suspect 
with good reason. 

There are all conceivable habits of composi- 
tion, and they range from the slow elaboration 
of John Foster to the race-horse speed of our 
doughty Southern countryman, Henry A. Wise, 
whose prodigious gubernatorial compositions 
are still remembered by a suffering world. 
Once, sitting by James Parton, he observed, 
tersely, " The best writing distils from the pen 
drop by drop." Sheridan once said to a 
friend who had a fatal facility with his pen, 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 35 

" Your easy writing makes terribly hard 
reading." 

I would not, for the world, have the young 
men of the country believe that in writing 
speed is all. One should not be ambitious to 
write or do anything else any faster than he 
can do it well. It was Henry Wadsworth 
Longfellow who once gave this excellent ad- 
vice to a young author : " Always write your 
best; remember, your best." 

Wilkie Collins' book, "Heart and Science," 
so mercilessly excited him that he says he con- C/A 
tinued writing week after week without a day's 
interval or rest. " Rest was impossible. I made 
a desperate effort ; rushed to the sea ; went 
sailing and fishing, and was writing my book 
all the time ' in my head,' as the children say. 
The one wise course to take was to go back to 
my desk and empty my head, and then rest. 
My nerves are too much shaken for travelling. 
An armchair and a cigar, and a hundred and 
fiftieth reading of the glorious Walter Scott, — 
King, Emperor, and President of Novel- 
ists, — there is the regimen that is doing me 
good. All the other novel-writers I can read 
while I am at work myself. If I only look 
at the 'Antiquary' or 'Old Mortality,' I am 
crushed by the sense of my own littleness, and 
there is no work possible for me on that day." 

Wilkie Collins made the skeleton of a novel 



36 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

and then proceeded to put the flesh on it. He was 
the greatest plotter that ever lived. He created 
no truly great characters, but his stories are 
full of thrilling pitfalls, into which the reader 
lunges. 

Hugo Rosenthal-Bonin, the editor of Ueber 
Land und Meer ( one of the most prominent of 
the illustrated journals of Germany), and the 
author of many successful novels, writes for 
two hours immediately after breakfast and din- 
ner, and within this time regularly composes 
five columns of reading matter, never rewriting 
a single line. While writing, he has a piece of 
looking-glass lying beside him, the glittering of 
which (so he says) stimulates and refreshes 
him; he also smokes cigars during working 
hours, otherwise seldom. He works with ease 
and rapidity, just as if he were speaking. 
Therefore, a novel of ten columns is finished 
within two days, and a romance of one hundred 
columns is completed in less than a month. He 
has never written more than one long novel a 
year, his literary productiveness being limited 
by his duties as editor. 

Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson ("H. H." ) com- 
posed with great rapidity, writing on large 
sheets of yellow post-office paper, eschewing 
pen and ink, and insisting that a lead pencil 
alone could keep pace with the swiftness of 
her thoughts. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 37 

Emil Ritterhaus, the poet who "dwells by 
the castled Rhine,' 2 turns out lyrical poems 
without any difficulty, and with wonderful 
rapidity. That poem of his which was read 
at the consecration of the cathedral at Cologne 
was composed in a few minutes, in the pres- 
ence of his friend, Ferdinand Hiller, not a line 
being changed afterward. When he is in the 
proper mood, many a speech of his turns invol- 
untarily into an improvisation. Verses he pens 
in person, but he dictates all other literary work. 
When at work, a good Havana cigar, a glass of 
first-class wine, or a cup of strong coffee are 
agreeable to him. When dictating, he is in the 
habit of lying on a sofa or walking slowly up and 
down the room. The poet makes it a rule not 
to write unless disposed to. 

Gray found fault with Mason for fancying 
he should succeed best by writing hastily in 
the first fervors of his imaginations, and, there- 
fore, never waiting for epithets if they did not 
occur at the time readily, but leaving spaces for 
them, and putting them in afterward. This 
enervated his poetry, said Gray, and he says 
the same thing of the same method by whom- 
soever adopted, for nothing is done so well as 
at the first concoction. One of Shelley's bi- 
ographers came upon the poet in a pine forest, 
writing verses on a guitar, and, picking up a 
fragment, saw a " frightful scrawl," all smear, and 



38 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

smudge, and disorder — such a dashed-off daub 
as conceited artists are apt to mistake for 
genius. Shelley said: "When my brain gets 
heated with thought, it soon boils, and throws 
off images and words faster than I can skim 
them off. In the morning, when cooled down, 
out of that rude sketch, as you justly call it, I 
shall attempt a drawing." 



IV. 
Influence Upon Writers of Time and Place. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne made innumerable 
notes of every fleeting, quaint fancy, strange 
anecdote, or eccentric person. These notes he 
afterward worked into his stories. Julian 
Hawthorne, his son, states in the Century 
Magazine : " The new husband and wife, 
Adam and Eve, as they liked to call themselves, 
were almost as poor in money as their proto- 
types, and in spite of their orchard and their 
vegetable garden, a good deal less able to get 
on without occasional remittances. Accord- 
ingly, the future author of the ' Scarlet Letter ' 
was compelled to alternate his hoeing and dig- 
ging, his rambles over the hills and his paddling 
on the river, with periods of application to 
pen and paper in his study, where he would sit 
with locked doors, clad in a long and ancient 
flowered dressing-gown, upon the lining of the 
left-hand skirt of which he was in the habit of 
wiping his pen. His wife noticed this habit, 
and said nothing about it ; but one day, on 
bringing his pen to the accustomed spot, Haw- 
thorne found stitched on there a pretty pen- 
wiper, in the shape of a butterfly with red and 
black wings, and this butterfly was ever after 
renewed from time to time, as necessity re- 



40 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

quired. What was written in that little sunny- 
hued study, readers know, but nobody, not even 
the author's wife, ever saw him in the act of 
writing. He had to be alone." 

Burns usually composed while walking in the 
open air, influenced, perhaps, Dr. Currie sug- 
gests, by habits formed in early life. Until he 
was completely master of a tune, he never 
could write words for it ; so his way was to 
consider the poetic sentiment corresponding to 
his idea of the musical expression ; then choose 
his theme; begin one stanza; when that was 
composed, — which was generally the most diffi- 
cult part of the task, — to walk out, sit down 
now and then, look out for objects in nature 
around him, such as harmonized with the cogi- 
tations of his fancy, humming occasionally the 
air, with the verses already framed. When he 
felt his " muse- beginning to jade," he retired 
to the solitary fireside of his study, and there 
committed his thoughts to paper ; swinging at 
intervals on the hind leg of his elbow-chair, "by 
way," he says, " of calling forth my own critical 
strictures as my pen goes on." Sometimes, 
and more than once too often, he composed, to 
use his own expression, " by the leeside of a 
bowl of punch, which had overset every mortal 
in company, except the hautbois and the muse." 

Whether in town or country, Landor reflected 
and composed habitually while walking, and, 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 41 

therefore, preferred at all times to walk alone. 
So did Buckle. Wordsworth was accustomed 
to compose his verse in his solitary walks, 
carry it in his memory, and get wife or 
daughter to write it down on his return. He 
used to compose aloud while walking in the 
fields and woods. Sometimes he would use a 
slate pencil and the smooth side of a rock to jot 
down his lines. His excursions and peculiar 
habits gave rise to some anxious beliefs among 
the ignorant peasantry. Even his sanity was 
questioned. The peasantry of Rydal thought 
him "not quite hissel," because he always 
walked alone, and was met at odd times in odd 
places. Some poets have been in the habit of 
humming or repeating their verses aloud as they 
composed them. Southey, for instance, boomed 
his verses so as to be mistaken by Wilson, who 
was a keen sportsman, for a bittern booming. 
If this is true, Southey's voice must not have 
been very harmonious, for the bittern's cry is 
Shakespeare's " night-raven's dismal voice." 

Douglas Jerrold worked at a desk without a 
speck upon it, using an ink-stand in a marble 
shell clear of all litter, his little dog at his feet. 
If a comedy was in progress, he would now and 
then walk rapidly up and down the room, talk- 
ing wildly to himself. " If it be Punch copy, 
you shall hear him laugh presently as he hits 
upon a droll bit." And then, abruptly, the pen 



42 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

would be put down, and the author would pass 
out into the garden, and pluck a hawthorn leaf, 
and go, nibbling it and thinking, down the side 
walks ; then " in again, and vehemently to 
work," unrolling the thought that had come to 
him along little blue slips of paper, in letters 
smaller than the type in which they were pres- 
ently to be set. 

Dr. Channing had the same habit of taking 
a turn in the garden, during which he was a 
study for the calm concentration of his look, 
and the deliberateness of his step : " Calmer, 
brighter, in a few moments he is seated again 
at his table, and his rapidly flying pen shows 
how full is the current of his thoughts." 

Jane Taylor, who commenced authorship as 
a very little girl indeed, and who used at that 
early stage to compose tales and dramas while 
whipping a top, — committing them to paper at 
the close of that exercise, — was in the habit, 
her brother Isaac tells us, of rambling for half 
an hour after breakfast, "to seek that pitch of 
excitement without which she never took up 
the pen." 

Of Dickens we are told that " some quaint 
little bronze figures on his desk were as much 
needed for the easy flow of his writing as blue 
ink or quill pens." 

Emanuel Kant, the philosopher, lived the life 
of a student; in fact, his life may be taken as 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 43 

the type of that of a, scholar. Kant, like Balzac, 
gave a daily dinner-party ; but when his guests 
were gone he took a walk in the country instead 
of seeking broken slumbers in a state of hun- 
ger. He came home at twilight, and read from 
candle-light till bedtime at ten. He arose 
punctually at five, and, over one cup of tea and 
part of a pipe, laid out his plan of work for the 
day. At seven he lectured, and wrote till din- 
ner-time at about one. The regularity of his 
life was automatic. He regulated his diet with 
the care of a physician. During the blind- 
man's holiday between his walk and candle- 
light he sat down to think in twilight fashion ; 
and while thus engaged, he always placed 
himself so that his eyes might fall on a certain 
old tower. This old tower became so necessary 
to his thoughts that, when some poplar trees 
grew up and hid it from his sight, he found 
himself unable to think at all, until, at his 
earnest request, the trees were cropped and the 
tower was brought into sight again. 

Kant's old tower recalls Buffon's incapability 
of thinking to good purpose except in full dress, 
and with his hair in such elaborate order that, 
by way of external stimulus to his brain, he 
had a hairdresser to interrupt his work twice, 
or, when very busy, thrice a day. To Aubrey 
we owe this account of Prynne's method of 
study: "He wore a long quilt cap, which 



44 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

came two or three inches at least over his eyes, 
and served him as an umbrella to defend his 
eyes from the light. About every three hours 
his man was to bring him a roll and a pot of 
ale, to refocillate his wasted spirits ; so he 
studied and drank and munched some bread; 
and this maintained him till night, and then 
he made a good supper." Refocillation is a 
favorite resource — whatever the word may be 
— with authors not a few. Addison, with his 
bottle of wine at each end of the long gallery at 
Holland House, — and Schiller, with his flask of 
old Rhenish and his coffee laced with old 
Cognac, at three in the morning, — occur to the 
memory at once. Shelley attempted to ruin 
his digestion by way of exciting the brain by 
continually munching bread while composing. 

The venerable Leopold von Ranke, one of 
the most eminent historians of the age, com- 
posed in the night as well as in the daytime, 
and even when more than ninety years of age 
sometimes worked till midnight. He had two 
secretaries. He was a late riser, as most 
night-workers are. After getting up late, he 
worked with his first amanuensis from ten in 
the morning until three in the afternoon. 
Thereupon, if the weather was fine, he took a 
walk in the public promenades, always accom- 
panied by a servant. He dined at five P. M., 
and then dictated to his second secretary from 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 45 

six in the evening until, gccasionally, one 
or two o'clock in the morning. He neither 
took stimulants nor smoked. He never worked 
when disinclined ; in fact, the disinclination to 
write was foreign to his nature. He always felt 
like writing. 

J. T. Trowbridge, the author of " The Vaga- 
bonds," always prefers daytime to night for 
literary work, but sometimes can compose verse 
only at night. He always sets out with a toler- 
ably distinct outline in his mind — rarely on 
paper — of what he intends to write. But the 
filling in he leaves to the suggestions of thought 
in the hour of composition, and often gets on 
to currents which carry him into unexpected 
by-ways. He seldom begins a story that he 
would not like to make twice as long as his 
contract allows, so many incidents and combin- 
ations suggest themselves as he goes on. He 
never works under the influence of stimulants. 
Verse he never composes with a pen in his 
hand. It is seldom that he can compose any 
that is in the least satisfactory to himself; when 
he can, he walks in pleasant places, if the 
weather is favorable, or lounges on rocks or 
banks, or in the woods ; or he lies on a sofa in 
a dimly-lighted room at night ; or in bed, where 
he elaborates his lines, which he retains in his 
memory, to be written down at the first con- 
venient season. He rarely puts pen to paper 



46 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

at night. When fairly launched in a prose 
composition, he writes from two to four hours 
a day, seldom five. The mere act of writing is 
a sad drudgery to him, and he often has to 
force himself to begin. Then he usually forgets 
the drudgery in the interest excited by the de- 
velopment of his thoughts. But he never thinks 
it wise to continue writing when he cannot do 
so with pleasure and ease. In his younger 
days he used to think he must do a certain 
amount of work each day, whether he felt like 
it or not. But now he is of the opinion that it 
might have been better for his readers and 
himself if he had been governed more by his 
moods. 

Robert Hamerling, the Austrian novelist, 
loved to compose in bed in the early hours of 
morning. He was an expert stenographer, and, 
therefore, made use of stenography when com- 
mitting his thoughts to paper, thereby saving 
much time, which, of course, facilitated the 
mental labor. For this reason, he could also cor- 
rect and improve the manuscript, as well as 
make additions to the same, with the least 
waste of time. He did not require refresh- 
ments at work, and wrote with remarkable 
facility. The duration of the time which he 
spent at the writing-desk depended upon the 
state of his health and the temper of his mind. 

Frederick Friedrich, well known in Germany 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 47 

as a novelist, prefers the evening for literary 
work, although he conceives the plots of his 
stories in the course of the day. He asserts 
that the nerves are more stimulated and that 
the imagination is more lively in the evening. 
His novels are sent to the printer as they were 
written ; he hardly ever makes corrections. 
While at work Friedrich fills the air with cigar 
smoke and drinks several glasses of Rhine-wine. 
He must be alone, and the writing-table must be 
in the customary order; any new arrangement 
of the things on the table makes the author 
feel uncomfortable, so much so at times that it 
prevents him from writing. He is a tacile 
writer, and composes with great speed. He 
never writes unless inclined to, and is governed 
by moods. Therefore, a week or two some- 
times passes before he pens a line, being in 
perfect health, but lacking the inclination to 
perform intellectual work. He never devotes 
more than three hours a day to literary labor, 
generally less than that, but spends almost all 
day in thinking over the plots of his novels. 
He never begins a story until it is elaborated in 
his mind, and never makes notes. When once 
engaged in the composition of a novel, he keeps 
at it day after day until it is finished. While 
writing his own he is unable to read the novels 
of anybody else. 

Celia Thaxter evolves her graceful verses in 



48 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

the daytime. She sometimes makes a skeleton 
of her work first, not always; and very often 
forces herself to work in spite of disinclination. 

The Austrian poet, Rudolph Baumbach, is 
partial to daylight, and never writes at night. 
He always makes an outline of his work before 
beginning in good earnest. When meditating 
on his poems he walks up and down the room, 
but gives the open air the preference. He 
likes much light ; when the sun does not shine 
his work does not progress favorably. In the 
evening he lights up his room by a large num- 
ber of candles. Literary labor is pleasure to 
him when the weather is fine, but it is extremely 
hard when clouds shut out the sunlight. The 
poet has no fixed rule as regards working- 
hours ; sometimes he exerts himself a great 
deal for weeks, and then again he does not 
write at all for a long time. 

Otto von Leixner, German historian, poet, 
novelist, and essayist, composes prose, which 
requires logical thinking, in the daytime, but 
does poetical work, which taxes principally the 
imagination, in the evening. He makes a skel- 
eton of all critical and scientific compositions, 
indeed of all essays, and then writes out the 
" copy " for the press, seldom making altera- 
tions. But he files away at poems from time 
to time until he thinks them fit for publication. 
He is a smoker, but does not smoke when at 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 49 

work. Whether promenading the shady walks 
of a wood or perambulating the dusty streets of 
the city, Leixner constantly thinks about the 
works he has in hand. Literary work has no 
difficulties for this author ; he penned one of 
his poems, " The Vision," consisting of five 
hundred and eighty lines, in three hours and a 
half and sent it to the printer as it was origi- 
nally written ; and he composed the novel 
"Adja," thirty-nine and one-half octavo pages 
in print, in nine hours. But he often meditates 
over the topics which go to make up his novels, 
etc., for years and years until he has considered 
them from every standpoint. After composi- 
tion he often, locks up his manuscript in his 
desk for half a year, until it is almost forgotten, 
when he takes it from its place of concealment 
and examines it carefully to detect possible 
errors. If at such an examination the work 
does not prove satisfactory to him, he throws it 
into the stove. Being the editor of a journal of 
fiction, he is often compelled to work whether 
he wants to or not. From 1869 to 1870 he 
worked sixteen hours a day; from 1877 till 
1882 about thirteen hours, even Sundays; at 
present he spends from ten to eleven hours 
every day at the writing-table, unless kept from 
work by visitors. He retains his health by 
taking a daily walk, rain or shine, to which he 
devotes two hours. Leixner lives a very tern- 



50 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

perate life and hardly ever imbibes stimulating 
drinks. 

The greatest of all Southern poets, Paul 
Hamilton Hayne, had no particular time for 
composition, writing as often in the daytime as 
at night. Whether he made an outline or skel- 
eton of his work first, depended upon the 
nature of the poem. When the piece was elab- 
orate, he outlined it, and subsequently filled up, 
much as a painter would do. The poet used to 
smoke a great deal in composing, but was 
obliged to abandon tobacco, having had at- 
tacks of hemorrhage. He used tea instead of 
coffee sometimes, but took little even of that. 
Wine he did not use. Hayne composed best 
when walking, or riding upon horseback, and as 
he was seldom without a book in hand, wrote a 
great deal on the fly-leaves of any volume he 
chanced to be consulting. He frequently had 
to force himself to work when he did not have 
an inclination to do so. 



V. 
Writing Under Difficulties. 

■ It is an exceptional mind that enables an 
author to write at his ease amid interruptions 
and distractions, lets and hindrances, of a 
domestic kind. Heloise gave this singular 
reason for her constant refusal to become 
Abelard's wife — that no mind devoted to tjje 
meditations of philosophy could endure the 
cries of children, the chatter of nurses, and the 
babble and coming and going in and out of 
serving men and women. Of Abelard himself, 
however, we are told that he had a rare power 
of abstracting himself from all outward con- 
cerns ; that no one knew better how to be 
alone, though surrounded by others ; and that, 
in fact, his senses took no note of outward 
things. When Cumberland was composing 
any work, he never shut himself up in his study, 
but always wrote in the room where his family 
sat, and did not feel in the least disturbed by 
the noise of his children at play beside him. 
The literary habits of Lord Hailes, as Mr. 
Robert Chambers remarks, were hardly such 
as would have been expected from his extreme 
nicety of diction : it was in no secluded sanc- 
tum, or " den," that he composed, but by the 



52 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

"parlour fireside," with wife and bairns within 
very present sight and sound. 

Cowper describes himself at Weston (i 791) 
as working in a study exposed to all manner of 
inroads, and in no way disconcerted by the 
coming and going of servants, or other inci- 
dental and inevitable impediments. A year or 
two later he writes from the same spot, 
" amidst a chaos of interruptions, 7 ' including 
Hayley spouting Greek, and Mrs. Unwin talk- 
ing sometimes to them, sometimes to herself. 
Francis Horner relates a visit he and a friend 
paid to Jeremy Bentham at Ford Abbey, one 
spacious room in which, a tapestried chamber, 
the utilitarian philosopher had utilized for what 
he called his*" scribbling shop " — two or three 
tables being set out, covered with white nap- 
kins, on which were placed music desks with 
manuscripts ; and here the visitors were al- 
lowed to be " present at the mysteries, for he 
went on as if we had not been with him." 

The fourth of Dr. Chalmers 7 Astronomical 
Discourses was penned in a small pocket-book, 
in a strange apartment, where he was liable 
every moment to interruption ; for it was at the 
manse of Balmerino, disappointed in not find- 
ing the minister at home, and having a couple 
of hours to spare, — and in a drawing-room at 
the manse of Kilmany, with all the excitement 
of meeting for the first time, after a year's 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 53 

absence, many of his former friends and parish- 
ioners, — that he penned paragraph after para- 
graph of a composition which, as his son-in-law 
and biographer, Dr. Hanna, says, bears upon it 
so much the aspect of high and continuous 
elaboration. 

His friend, — and sometimes associate in pas- 
toral work, — Edward Irving, on the other hand, 
could not write a sermon if any one was in the 
room with him. Chalmers appears to have 
been specially endowed with that faculty of 
concentrated attention which is commonly re- 
garded as one of the surest marks of the 
highest intellect, and which Alison so much 
admired in Wellington — as, for instance, on 
the day when he lay at San Christoval, in front 
of the French army, hourly expecting a battle, 
and wrote out, in the field, a long and minute 
memorial on the establishment of a bank at 
Lisbon on the principles of the English ones. 

We read of Ercilla, whose epic poem, the 
AraHfana, has admirers out of Spain, that he 
wrote it amidst the incessant toils and dangers 
of a campaign against barbarians, without shel- 
ter, and with nothing to write on but small 
scraps of waste paper, and often only leather ; 
struggling at once against enemies and sur- 
rounding circumstances. 

Louis de Cormantaigne, the distinguished 
French engineer, composed his treatise on for- 



54 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

tification from notes written in the trenches 
and on the breaches, even under the fire of the 
enemy. 

Delambre*was in Paris when it was taken by 
the allies in 1814, and is said to have worked 
at his problems with perfect tranquility from 
eight in the morning till midnight, in the con- 
tinued hearing of the cannonade. " Such self- 
possession for study under that tremendous at- 
tack, and such absence of interest in the result 
of the great struggle, to say nothing of indiffer- 
ence to personal danger," is what one of his 
biographers confesses himself unable to under- 
stand. Small sympathy would the philosopher 
have had with the temperament of such a man, 
say, as Thomas Hood, who always wrote most 
at night, when all was quiet and the children 
were asleep. " I have a room to myself," 
exclaims Hood, triumphantly, in a letter 
describing a change of lodgings, "which will 
be worth ^20 a year to me, — for a little dis- 
concerts my nerves." Mrs. Hood brought up 
the children, we learn from one of them, in a 
sort of Spartan style of education, on her hus- 
band's account, teaching them the virtues of 
silence and low voices. 

Washington Irving was of a less morbid 
temperament, and his genial nature could put up 
with obstacles and obstructions neither few nor 
small ; but even in his Diary we meet with 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. $S 

such entries as this at Bordeaux, in 1825: 
" Harassed by noises in the house, till I had to 
go out in despair, and write in Mr. Guestier's 
library." It was upon the Essay on American 
Scenery that he was then engaged. 

Unlike Maturin, who used to compose with a 
wafer pasted on his forehead, which was the 
signal that if any of his family entered the sanc- 
tum they must not speak to him, Scott allowed 
his children ( like their mute playmates, Camp 
and the greyhounds ) free access to his study, 
never considered their talk as any disturbance, 
let them come and go as pleased their fancy, 
was always ready to answer their questions, and 
when they, unconscious how he was engaged 
( writes the husband of one of them ), entreated 
him to lay down his pen and tell them a story, 
he would take them on his knee, repeat a 
ballad or a legend, kiss them, and set them 
down again to their marbles or ninepins, and 
resume his labor as if refreshed by the inter- 
ruption. There was nothing in that manly, 
sound, robust constitution akin to the morbid 
irritability of Philip in the poem: — 

" When Philip wrote, he never seemed so well — 
Was startled even if a cinder fell, 
And quickly worried." 

Biographers of Mistress Aphra Behn make 
it noteworthy of that too facile penwoman that 
she could write away in company and main- 



56 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

tain the while her share in the talk. Madame 
Roland managed to get through her memoirs 
with a semblance at least of unbroken serenity, 
though so often interrupted in the composition 
of them by the cries of victims in the adjoining 
cells, whom the executioners were dragging 
thence to the guillotine. 

Madame de Stael, "even in her most inspired 
compositions," according to Madame Necker de 
Saussure, " had pleasure in being interrupted 
by those she loved." She was not, observed 
Lord Lytton, of the tribe of those who labor to 
be inspired; who darken the room and lock the 
door, and entreat you not to disturb them. 
Rather, she came of the same stock as George 
Sand's Olympe, who " se mit a dcrire sur un 
coin de la table, entre le bouteille de biere et le 
sucrier, au bruit des verres et de la conversa- 
tion aussi tranquillement que si elle eut 6t6 
dans la solitude. Cette puissance de concen 
tration etait une de ses faculte's les plus re- 
marquables." 

That Lord Castlereagh was able to write his 
despatches at the common table in the com- 
mon room of a country house is not unjustly 
among the admiring reminiscences of a Septua- 
genarian (Countess Brownlow): " Once only we 
found the talking and laughter were too much for 
his power of abstraction, and then he went off 
into his own room, saying next morning at 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. S7 

breakfast, ' You fairly beat me last night ; I 
was writing what I may call the metaphysics 
of politics.' " 

Celebrated in the "Noctes Ambrosianae " is 
the Glasgow poet, Sandy Rogers, not less for his 
lyrics, one at least of which is pronounced by 
Christopher North to be " equal to anything of 
the kind in Burns," than for the fact that his 
verses — some of them, too, of a serious char- 
acter — were thought out amidst the bustle and 
turmoil of factory labor, the din of the clank- 
ing steam-engine, and the deafening rattle of 
machinery, while the work of committing them 
to paper was generally performed amidst the 
squalling and clamor of children around the 
hearth, now in the noise of fractious conten- 
tion, and anon exuberant with fun and frolic. 

Tannahill, too, composed while plying the 
shuttle, — humming over the airs to which he 
meant to adapt new words ; and, as the words 
occurred to him, jotting them down at a rude 
desk which he had attached to his loom, and 
which he could use without rising from his 
seat. But no more noteworthy example of the 
pursuit of authorship under difficulties — the 
difficulties of a narrow home — res aygusta , 
domi — is probably on record, in its simple, 
homely way, than that of Jean Paul, as Doring 
pictures him, sitting in a corner of the room in 
which the household work was being carried 



58 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

on — he at his plain writing-desk, with few or no 
books about him, but merely with a drawer or 
two containing excerpts and manuscripts ; the 
jingle and clatter that arose from the simulta- 
neous operations at stove and dresser no more 
seeming to disturb him than did the cooing of 
the pigeons which fluttered to and fro in the 
chamber, at their own sweet will. 

Dr. Johnson delved at his dictionary in a 
poor lodging-house in London, with a cat pur- 
ring near, and orange peel and tea at hand. 

Moliere tested the comic power of his plays 
by reading them to an old servant. 

Dr. William E. Channing used to perambu- 
late the room while composing ; his printers re- 
port that he made many revisions of the proof 
of his writings, so that before the words met 
the eyes of the public on the printed page the 
sentences were finished with the most elabo- 
rate minuteness. 

Bloomfield, the poet, relates of himself that 
nearly one-half of his poem, " The Farmer's 
Boy," was composed without writing a word of 
it, while he was at work, with other shoemakers, 
in a garret. 

Sharon Turner, author of the valuable " His- 
tory of the Anglo-Saxons," who received a 
pension of $1,500 from the British government 
for his services to literature, wrote the third 
volume of " The Sacred History of the World " 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 59 

upon paper that did not cost him a farthing. 
The copy consisted of torn and angular frag- 
ments of letters and notes, of covers of periodi- 
cals and shreds of curling papers, unctuous with 
pomatum and bear's grease. 

Mrs. Lizzie W. Champney writes absolutely 
without method. Her stories, she admits, have 
been penned in her nursery, with her baby in 
her lap, and a sturdy little boy standing on the 
rails of her chair and strangling her with his 
loving little arms. She works whenever and 
wherever she can find the opportunity ; but the 
children are always put first. 

George Ticknor, the Bostonian, found Wil- 
liam Hazlitt living in the very house in which 
Milton dictated " Paradise Lost," and occupy- 
ing the room where the poet kept the organ on 
which he loved to play. It was an enormous 
room, but furnished only with a table, three 
chairs, and an old picture. The most interest- 
ing thing that the visitor from Boston saw, 
except the occupant himself, was the white- 
washed walls. Hazlitt had used them as a 
commonplace book, writing on them in pencil 
scraps of brilliant thoughts, half-lines of poetry, 
and references. Hazlitt usually wrote with the 
breakfast things on the table, and there they 
remained until he went out, at four or five 
o'clock, to dinner. His pen was more to him 
than a mechanical instrument ; it was also the 



60 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

intellectual wand by which he called up 
thoughts and opinions, and clothed them in 
appropriate language. 

It was in a bookseller's back-shop, M. 
Nisard tells us, on a desk to which was 
fastened a great Newfoundland dog (who, by- 
the-bye, one day banged through the window of 
an upper room, desk and all, to join his master 
in the street below ), that Armand Carrel, one 
moment absorbed in English memoirs and 
papers, another moment in caressing his four- 
footed friend, conceived and wrote his " History 
of the Counter Revolution in England." Mr. 
Walker, in this as in other respects " The 
Original," adopted a mode of composition 
which, says he, " I apprehend to be very dif- 
ferent from what could be supposed, and from 
the usual mode. I write in a bedroom at a 
hotel, sitting upon a cane chair, in the same 
dress I go out in, and with no books to refer to 
but the New Testament, Shakespeare, and a 
pocket dictionary." Now and then, when much 
pressed for time, and without premeditation, 
and with his eye on the clock, he wrote some 
of his shorter essays at the Athenaeum Club, at 
the same table where other members were 
writing notes and letters. 



VI. 
Aids to Inspiration. 

Washington Irving's literary work was gener- 
ally performed before noon. He said the hap- 
piest hours of his life were those passed in the 
composition of his different books. He wrote 
most of "The Stout Gentleman" while mounted 
on a stile, or seated on a stone, in his excursions 
with Leslie, the painter, 'round about Stratford- 
on-Avon, — the latter making sketches in the 
mean time. The artist says that his companion 
wrote with the greatest rapidity, often laughing 
to himself, and from time to time reading the 
manuscript aloud. " 

Dr. Darwin wrote most of his works on scraps 
of paper with a pencil as he travelled. But how 
did he travel ? In a worn and battered " sulky," 
which had a skylight at the top, with an awn- 
ing to be drawn over it at pleasure ; the front 
of the carriage being occupied by a receptacle 
for writing-paper and pencils, a knife, fork, and 
spoon ; while on one side was a pile of books 
reaching from the floor nearly to the front win- 
dow of the carriage; on the other, by Mrs* 
Schimmel-penninck's account, a hamper con- 
taining fruit and sweetmeats, cream and sugar, 
— to which the big, burly, keen-eyed, stammer- 



62 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

ing doctor paid attentions as devoted as he ever 
bestowed on the pile of books. 

Alexander Kisfaludy, foremost Hungarian 
poet of his time, wrote most of his " Himfy " 
on horseback or in solitary walks; a poem, or 
collection of poems, that made an unprece- 
dented sensation in Hungary, where, by the same 
token, Sandor Kisfaludy of that ilk became at 
once the Great Unknown. 

Cujas, the object of Chateaubriand's special 
admiration, used to write lying flat on his 
breast, with his books spread about him. 

Sir Henry Wotton is our authority for record- 
ing of Father Paul Sarpi that, when engaged in 
writing, his manner was to sit fenced with a castle 
of paper about his chair, and overhead ; " for he 
was of our Lord of St. Albans' opinion, that ' all air 
is predatory' and especially hurtful when the 
spirits are most employed." 

Rousseau tells us that he never could compose 
pen in hand, seated at a table, and duly supplied 
with paper and ink ; it was in his promenades, — 
the promenades d^un solitaire, — amid rocks and 
woods, and at night, in bed, when he was lying 
awake, that he wrote in his brain ; to use his 
own phrase, " ydcris dans mon cerveau." Some 
of his periods he turned and re-turned half 
a dozen nights in bed before he deemed 
them fit to be put down on paper. On moving 
to the Hermitage of Montmorency, he adopted 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 63 

the same plan as in Paris, — devoting, as always, 
his mornings to the pen-work de la copie, and 
his afternoons to la promenade, blank paper, 
book, and pencil in hand ; for, says he, " having 
never been able to write and think at my ease 
except in the open air, stile dio, I was not 
tempted to change my method, and I reckoned 
not a little on the forest of Montmorency becom- 
ing — for it was close to my door — my cabinet de 
travail." In another place he affirms his sheer 
incapacity for meditation by day, except in the 
act of walking ; the moment he stopped walk- 
ing, he stopped thinking, too, for his head 
worked with, and only with, his feet. " De 
jour je ne puis mediter qu'en marchant j 
sit St que je nfarrete je ne pense plus, et 
ma tete ne va qu'avec mes pieds" Salvitur 
ambulando, whatever intellectual problem is 
solved by Jean Jaques. His strength was not 
to sit still. His ReVeries, by the way, were 
written on scraps of paper of all sorts and sizes, 
on covers of old letters, and on playing cards — 
all covered with a small, neat handwriting. He 
was as economical of material as was " Paper- 
sparing Pope " himself. 

In some points Chateaubriand was intellectu- 
ally, or, rather, sentimentally, related to Rous- 
seau, but not in his way of using ink and paper. 

Chateaubriand sat at a table well supplied 
with methodically arranged heaps of paper cut 



64 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

in sizes ; and as soon as a page was blotted over 
in the biggest of his big handwriting, — accord- 
ing to M. de Marcullus, with almost as many 
drops of ink as words, — he tossed it aside, 
without using paunce or blotting-paper, to blot 
and be blotted by its accumulating fellows. Now 
and then he got up from this work, to look out 
of the window, or to pace the room, as if in 
quest of new ideas. The chapter finished, he 
collected all the scattered leaves, and revised 
them in due form — more frequently adding to 
than curtailing their fair proportions, and pay- 
ing very special attention to the punctuation of 
his sentences. 

Lessing's inherent nobility of intellect is said to 
have been typified in his manner of study. When 
in the act of composition he walked up and down 
till his eye was caught by the title of some book. 
He would open it, his brother tells us, and, 
if struck by some sentence which pleased him, he 
would copy it out ; in so doing, a train of 
thought would be suggested, and this would 
be immediately followed up — provided his 
mood was just right. 

The early morning would lure Jean Paul 
Richter to take out his ink-flask and write 
as he walked in the fragrant air. Such com- 
positions as his " Dream of a Madman " he 
would set about by first seating himself at the 
harpsichord, and " fantasying " for a while on 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 65 

it, till the ideas, or "imaginings," came — which 
presently they would do with a rush. 

Tradition, as we get it through the historian 
of the Clapham Sect, informs us that Wilber- 
force wrote his "Practical View" under the 
roof of two of his best friends, in so fragmentary 
and irregular a manner, that one of them, when 
at length the volume lay complete on the table, 
professed, on the strength of this experience, to 
have become a convert to the opinion that a 
fortuitous concourse of atoms might, by some 
felicitous chance, combine themselves into the 
most perfect of forms — a moss-rose or a bird 
of paradise. 

Coleridge told Hazlitt that he liked to com- 
pose in walking over uneven ground, or break- 
ing through the straggling branches of a copse- 
wood. 

Sheridan composed at night, with a profusion 
of lights around him, and a bottle of wine by 
his side. He used to say i " If a thought is 
slow to come, a glass of good wine encourages 
it ; and when it does come, a glass of good wine 
rewards it." 

Lamartine, in the days of his prosperity, com- 
posed in a studio with tropical plants, birds, and 
every luxury around him to cheer the senses. 

Berkeley composed his "Minute Philosopher " 
under the shade of a rock on Newport Beach. 

Burns wove a stanza as he ploughed the field. 



66 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

Charlotte Bronte had to choose her favorable 
days for writing, — sometimes weeks, or even 
months, elapsing before she felt that she had 
anything to add to that portion of her story 
which was already written ; then some morning 
she would wake up, and the progress of her tale 
lay clear and bright before her, says Mrs. Gas- 
kell, in distinct vision ; and she set to work to 
write out what was more present to her mind at 
such times than her actual life was. She wrote 
on little scraps of paper, in a minute hand, hold- 
ing each against a piece of board, such as is used 
in binding books, for a desk, — a plan found to 
be necessary for one so short-sighted, — and this 
sometimes as she sat near the fire by twilight. 

While writing " Jane Eyre " she became in- 
tensely concerned in the fortunes of her hero- 
ine, whose smallness and plainness corresponded 
with her own. When she had brought the 
little Jane to Thorrifield, her enthusiasm had 
grown so great that she could not stop. She 
went on incessantly for weeks. At the end of 
this time she had made the minute woman con- 
quer temptation, and in the dawn of the summer 
morning leave Thornneld. " After Jane left 
Thornfield, the rest of the book," says Miss 
Martineau, " was written with less vehemence 
and with more anxious care " — the world adds, 
"with less vigor and interest." 

" Ouida " ( Louise de la Ramee ) writes in the 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 6j 

early morning. She gets up at five o'clock, and, 
before she begins, works herself up into a sort 
of literary trance. 

Professor Wilson, the Christopher North of 
Blackwood's Magazine, jotted down in a large 
ledger " skeletons," from which, when he de- 
sired an article, he would select one and clothe 
it with muscle and nerve. He was a very rapid 
writer and composer, but worked only when he 
liked and how he liked. He maintained that 
any man in good health might write an entire 
number of Blackwood' f s. He described himself 
as writing "by screeds" — the fit coming on 
about ten in the morning, which he encouraged 
by a caulker ( " a mere nut-shell, which my dear 
friend the English opium-eater would toss off in 
laudanum " ) ; and as soon as he felt that there 
was no danger of a relapse, that his demon 
would be with him the whole day, he ordered 
dinner at nine, shut himself up within triple 
doors, and set manfully to work. " No desk ! 
An inclined plane — except in bed — is my ab- 
horrence. All glorious articles must be written 
on a dead flat." His friend, the Ettrick Shep- 
herd, used a slate. 

Dr. Georg Ebers, professor at the University 
of Leipzig, Saxony, who is known all over the 
world as the author of novels treating of ancient 
Egyptian life, and as the writer of learned 
treatises on the country of the Khedives, pre- 



68 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

fers to work in the late evening hours until mid- 
night when composing poetry, but favors day- 
light for labor on scientific topics. He makes a 
rough draft of his work, has this copied by an 
amanuensis, and then polishes and files it until 
it is satisfactory to him, that is, as perfect as he 
possibly can make it. He finds that tobacco 
stimulates him to work, and, therefore, he uses it 
when engaged in literary production. When he 
writes poetry, he is in the habit of sitting in an 
arm-chair, supporting a lap-board on his knee, 
which holds the paper ; in this position he pens 
his lyrics. He imagines that he is more at lib- 
erty in this posture than when behind a writing 
desk. Ordinarily he writes with great ease, but 
sometimes the composition of a stirring chapter 
so mercilessly excites him that great beads of 
sweat appear upon his forehead, and he is com- 
pelled to lay down his pen, unable to write 
another line. He never writes unless he is in a 
suitable frame of mind, except it be on business 
matters. Sometimes, when laboring on topics 
of science, he works from ten to twelve hours 
at a stretch ; he never spends more than three 
or four hours in succession on poetry. 

Charles Reade's habit of working was unique. 
When he had decided on a new work he plotted 
out the scheme, situations, facts, and characters 
on three large sheets of pasteboard. Then he 
set to work, using very large foolscap to write 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 69 

on, working rapidly, but with frequent references 
to his storehouse of facts, in the scrap-books, 
which were ready at his hand. The genial 
novelist was a great reader of newspapers. 
Anything that struck him as interesting, or any 
fact which tended to support one of his humani- 
tarian theories, was cut out, pasted in a large 
folio scrap-book, and carefully indexed. Facts 
of any sort were his hobby. From the scrap- 
books thus collected with great care he used 
to elaborate the "questions" treated of in his 
novels. 

Like Charles Reade, Miss Anna Katherine 
Green is a believer in scrap-books, and culls 
from newspapers accounts of strange events. 
Out of # such material she weaves her stories of 
crime and its detection. 

Emile Zola, the graphic author of realistic 
fiction, carefully makes studies from life for his 
sensational works. He writes rapidly, smoking 
cigarettes the while. He is an inveterate 
smoker, and, if there is anything he likes bet- 
ter than tobacco, it is his beautiful country- 
house near Paris, where he receives daily a 
large circle of admiring friends. 

Edward P. Roe, who, if we may rate success by 
the wide circulation of an author's books, was 
our most successful novelist, preferred the day- 
time for literary work, and rarely accomplished 
much in the evening beyond writing letters, 



70 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

reading, etc. When pressed with work he put 
in long hours at night. In the preface to 
" Without a Home," Rev. Mr. Roe presents some 
extremely interesting matter in regard to the 
causes which led to his authorship, and the 
methods of work by which he turned out so 
many well-constructed stories in so short a time. 
" Ten years ago," he says, " I had never written 
a line of a story, and had scarcely entertained 
the thought of constructing one. The burning 
of Chicago impressed me powerfully, and, obedi- 
ent to an impulse, I spent several days among 
its smoking ruins. As a result, my first novel, 
* Barriers Burned Away,' gradually took posses- 
sion of my mind. I did not manufacture the 
story at all, for it grew as naturally as do the 
plants — weeds, some may suggest — on my 
farm. In the intervals of a busy and practical 
life, and also when I ought to have been sleep- 
ing, my imagination, unspurred and almost un- 
directed, spun the warp and woof of the tale and 
wove them together. ... I merely let the 
characters do as they pleased, and work out 
their own destiny. I had no preparation for the 
work beyond a careful study of the topography 
of Chicago and the incidents of the fire. For 
nearly a year my chief recreation was to dwell 
apart among the shadows created by my fancy, 
and I wrote when and where I could — on 
steamboats and railroad cars, as well as in my 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. J\ 

study. . . . When the book appeared I 
suppose I looked upon it much as a young 
father looks upon his first child. His interest 
in it is intense, but he knows well that its future 
is very doubtful." Mr. Roe always wrote from a 
feeling that he had something to say ; and never 
"manufactured" a novel in his life. While 
writing he was absorbed in his work ; and made 
elaborate studies for his novels. " I have 
visited," said he, in reference to " Without a 
Home," "scores of typical tenements. I have 
sat day after day on the bench with the police 
judges, and have visited the station-houses re- 
peatedly. There are few large retail shops that 
I have not entered many times, and I have con- 
versed with both employers and employees." 

Mr. Roe did not make " outlines " or " skele- 
tons " to any great extent, and when he did so, he 
did not follow them closely. Indeed, he often 
reversed his plan, satisfied that following an ar- 
bitrary outline makes both story and charac- 
ters wooden. He held that the characters 
should control the author, not he them. He 
usually received the suggestion of a story un- 
expectedly, and let it take form in his mind and 
grow naturally, like a plant, for months, more 
often for years, before he began to write. He 
averred that after his characters were introduced 
he became merely the reporter of what they do, 
say, and think. He imagined that it was this spon- 



72 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

taneity which, chiefly, made his books popular, 
and said that to reach intelligent people through 
fiction, the life portrayed must seem to them 
real and natural, and that this can scarcely be 
true of his characters if the author is forever 
imposing his arbitrary will upon them. Mr. 
Roe wrote in bound blank-books, using but one 
side of a sheet. This allowed ample space for 
changes and corrections, and the manuscript 
was kept in place and order. The novelist 
used tea, and especially coffee, to some extent 
as a stimulant, and smoked very mild cigars. 
But he rarely took coffee at his dinner, at six 
P. M., as it tended to insomnia. The author of 
" Barriers Burned Away " worked three or four 
hours before and two or three hours after lunch. 
On this point, however, he varied. When 
wrought up and interested in a scene, he 
usually completed it. In the after part of the 
day, when he began to feel weary, he stopped, 
and, if hard pressed, began work again in the 
evening. Once, many years ago, he wrote 
twenty-four hours at a stretch, with the aid 
of coffee. He did not force himself to work 
against inclination beyond a certain point. At 
the same time he fought against a tendency to 
"moods and tenses." 

The German lyric poet, Martin Greif, writes 
only in the daytime, because he can conceive 
poetry only when walking in the woods, mead- 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 73 

ows, and lanes that form the environs of the 
Bavarian capital — Munich. During his excur- 
sions into the surrounding country, he notes 
down his thoughts, which he elaborates when he 
reaches his quiet study. He is not a ready 
versifier, and is compelled to alter a poem re- 
peatedly before it receives his approbation. 
At work in the afternoon, he loves to smoke 
moderately; but he never uses stimulants. 
Generally work is hard to him, but sometimes — 
that is, rarely — he writes with unusual rapidity. 
As a professional writer, he must sometimes 
force himself to work and must mount the Peg- 
asus in spite of disinclination, as when, for 
instance, a product of his pen has to be deliv- 
ered on a certain date. 

Emile Mario Vacano composed his writings at 
all times that gave him the impulse for doing 
so : at daybreak or in the night. With him 
it was the " whereabouts," not the hour, that 
made the essence. There was a mill belonging 
to a good friend of his, where he found his best 
inspirations amidst all the hubbub of horses, 
peasants, poultry, cows, pigeons, and country 
life. And he asserted that the name of his friend, 
Harry Salzer, of Stattersdorf, near St. Poelten, 
Lower Austria, ought to be joined to his. He 
said that his friend merited a great share of his 
"glories " by his hospitality as well as on ac- 
count of his bright ideas. Vacano never made 



74 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

a plan in advance, but penned his novels, stories, 
essays, etc., as one writes a letter, — prima vista, 
— never perusing again what he had written, 
be it good or bad. When writing he imbibed a 
good deal of beer, and was in the habit of using 
snuff. He did not regard writing as work. 
For him it was like a chat in pen and ink with 
friends. As for an inclination to work ; as for 
a feeling that he had something to say, and must 
say it, come what will, — there was nothing of the 
sort in him. He said he hated romances, tales, 
and all the like, and wrote onfy to gain his 
"pain quotidien" and that he detested the hum- 
bug with all his heart and despised the mob that 
would read it. He declared that if he were a mil- 
lionaire or simply wealthy, " he'd never take a 
pen in hand for bullying a stupid public with 
his nonsense." 

Emile Richebourg writes his fascinating 
novels in a plain style, but, despite the absence 
of flowery language, is capable of expressing 
much feeling. The novel or drama is com- 
pleted in his head before he writes a line. As 
the plot develops, the dialogues and events sug- 
gest themselves. When he has got to work he 
keeps right on, seldom re-reading what he has 
composed. He makes an outline of his book 
before beginning. He is in the habit of noting 
down on a piece of paper the names, ages, lodg- 
ings, etc., of the persons who are pictured in his 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. J$ 

novels, also the title of each chapter. For- 
merly he worked from eight to twelve hours a 
day, but never at night. Now he labors only 
five or six hours at the most, and always in the 
morning. Richebourg is an early riser, and 
goes to bed early in the evening. He gets up 
at six in the morning. At eight o'clock he 
drinks a bowl of warm milk without sugar, 
which constitutes his sole nourishment until 
dinner at noon. With him this is the principal 
meal of the day ; and during its progress, ac- 
cording to his own confession, he finds a bottle 
of wine very agreeable. He eats but little in 
the evening. When at work he smokes contin- 
uously ; always a pipe. He works with diffi- 
culty, yet with pleasure, and identifies him- 
self, that is, when composing, with the person- 
ages whom he describes. During the afternoon 
he promenades in his garden, attends to his roses 
and other flowers, and trims the shrubs. 

The study of Maurice Jokai, the great Hunga- 
rian romancer, is a perfect museum of valuable 
souvenirs and rare antiquities. Books, journals, 
and pamphlets cover tables, chairs, and walls ; 
busts and statuettes, which stand about here and 
there, give the room the appearance of pictu- 
resque disorder. The portrait of his wife, in 
various sizes, adorns the space on the walls 
not taken up by the books. The top of his 
writing-table is full of bric-a-brac, which leaves 



j6 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

only sufficient room for the quarto paper upon 
which he pens his entertaining romances. He 
writes with little, fine pens, of so good a work- 
manship that he is enabled to write a four-vol- 
ume novel with one pen. He always makes use 
of violet ink, to which he is so accustomed that 
he becomes perplexed when compelled, outside 
of his house, to resort to ink of another color. 
He claims that thoughts are not forthcoming 
when he writes with any other ink. When 
violet ink is not within reach, he prefers to write 
with a lead pencil, but he does so only when 
composing short stories and essays. For the 
composition of his romances, which generally 
fill from one to five volumes when printed, vio- 
let ink is indispensable. He rarely corrects his 
manuscripts, and they generally go to the printer 
as they were originally composed ; they are 
written in a plain, legible hand ; and are what 
one of the typographic fraternity would call 
"beautiful copy." One of the corners of his 
writing-desk holds a miniature library, consisting 
of neatly-bound note-books, which contain the 
outlines of his novels as they originated in his 
mind. When he has once begun a romance, he 
keeps right on till he puts down the final period ; 
that is, he writes day by day till the novel is 
completed. Jokai says : " It often happens that 
I surround my hero with dangers, that enemies 
arise on all sides, and escape seems impossible. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. JJ 

Then I often say to myself : ' I wonder how the 
fellow will get out of the scrape ? ' " 

In his home, at Hartford, Conn., Mark 
Twain's workshop is in his billiard-room, at the 
top of the house, and when he grows tired of 
pushing the pen he rises and eases his muscles 
by doing some scientific strokes with the cue. 
He is a hard worker, and, like Trollope, believes 
that there is nothing like a piece of shoemaker's 
wax on the seat of one's chair to encourage 
good literary work. Ordinarily he has a fixed 
amount of writing for each day's duty. He 
rewrites many of his chapters, and some of 
them have been scratched out and interlined 
again and again. 

Robert Waldmueller, a leading German novel- 
ist, who writes under the pseudonym of " Charles 
Eduard Duboc," works mostly from eight, nine, 
or ten o'clock in the morning until tw T o o'clock 
in the afternoon, but never writes at night. 
Generally he does not plan his work beforehand. 
When at work he must be unmolested. In 
composition, he loves to change off, now pro- 
ducing poetry, now plays and essays, as his 
mood may direct. ■ He writes with great ease 
and swiftness ; and the many books which 
he has composed testify that he cannot justly 
be accused of indolence. He attributes his 
facility of expression to the discrimination 
which he has always exercised in the choice 



j8 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

of books. In early boyhood he was already 
disgusted with Florian's sickly " Guillaume 
Tell," while Washington Irving's " Sketch- 
book " delighted him very much ; he was also 
deeply impressed by the perusal of Homer's 
immortal epics. He adopted authorship when 
twenty-five years of age, and has followed it 
successfully ever since. Until then he was 
especially fond of composing music and of 
drawing and painting, but he lacked the time 
to perfect himself in these accomplishments. 
Yet, even to-day, he practices both arts occa- 
sionally as a pastime and for recreation. 

The evening finds Dr. Johann Fastenrath, 
the poet, who writes as elegant Spanish as he 
does German, and who is as well-known in 
Madrid as he is in Cologne on the Rhine, at 
the writing-table. He never makes a skeleton 
beforehand of essays in his mother-tongue ; 
but for compositions in French or Spanish he 
invariably makes an outline. One peculiarity 
which he has is to scribble his poems upon 
little scraps of paper. When writing prose in 
Spanish he divides the manuscript-paper in 
halves, so as to be able to make additions and 
to lengthen any particular sentence, for in the 
Spanish language artfully long periods are 
considered especially beautiful. He does not 
regard literary composition as work, and con- 
ceives poems faster than he can write them 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 79 

down. When he is at work absolute quiet must 
reign about him ; he cannot bear noise of any- 
kind. During the winter he works day for day 
at home, but in the summer he tolerates con- 
finement no longer, and whenever he composes 
at this time it is always in the open air. From 
autumn till spring he writes from six to seven 
hours a day. 

Adolf Streckfusz, a German novelist, prefers 
to write in the afternoon and evening, and attains 
the greatest speed in composition at night. He 
makes no plan beforehand, but revises his manu- 
script at least twice after completion. He often 
allows the cigar which he smokes when at work 
to go out, but lights it mechanically from time to 
time, so that the floor of his study is sometimes 
covered with dozens of thrown-away lucifers after 
working hours. When writing, his cigar is as 
indispensable to him as his pen. He can do 
without neither. Formerly he could work with 
extraordinary facility, but now, with increasing 
age, a few hours' work at times tires him out so 
much that he must, of necessity, take a rest. 
As with many other authors, a sense of duty often 
impels him to work; but almost always, after a 
beginning is made, he composes with pleasure. 
The time which he devotes daily to literary 
work varies. He never works more than eight 
hours, but rarely less than three or four hours a 
day. 



80 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

The author of " The Lady or the Tiger" and 
many other short stories — Frank R. Stockton 
— always works in the morning, and not at any 
other time. In writing a short story, such as is 
published in a single number of a magazine, he 
usually composes the whole story, description, 
incident, and even the dialogue, before writing a 
word of it. In this way the story is finished in 
his mind before it is begun on paper. While 
engaged in other writing he has carried in his 
memory for several months as many as three 
stories, each ready to be put upon paper as soon 
as he should have an opportunity. When he is 
writing a longer story, he makes in his mind a 
general outline of the plot, etc. ; and then he 
composes three or four chapters before he be- 
gins to write ; when these are finished, he stops 
writing until some more are thought out : he 
never composes at the point of the pen. He 
does not write any of his manuscripts himself ; 
they are all written from his dictation. Stock- 
ton is very fond of working in the summer in 
the open air, and a great many of his stories 
have been dictated while lying in a hammock. 
He usually works from about ten in the morn- 
ing until one P. M., but he spends no time at 
the writing-desk, except when he writes letters, 
which he never does in his working hours. Some 
years ago he used to work very differently, 
being occupied all day with editorial work, and 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 8l 

in the evening with literary work ; but his health 
would not stand this, and he, therefore, adopted 
his present methods. He works regularly every 
day, whether he feels like it or not ; but when 
he has set his mind on a subject, it is generally 
not long before he does feel like it. 

Dr. Leopold Chevalier de Sacher-Masoch 
generally used to work at night in former years, 
but now vvrites by daylight only, preferably in 
the morning. He is the author of a great many 
graphic stories about Galicia, and lives at Leip- 
sic, surrounded by a coterie of admiring friends. 
He makes an accurate outline ; then pens his 
novel word for word till it is finished, where- 
upon it is handed to the printer as it is, not a 
word being altered, added, or erased. He is 
not in the habit of using stimulating drinks or 
tobacco when at work, and leads altogether a 
temperate life. He has an innate predilection 
for fur, and declares that fur worn by a beautiful 
woman exercises a magic spell over him. For- 
merly he had a pretty black cat that used to lie 
on his knees or sleep on his writing-desk when 
he was at work. Now, when he writes, a red 
velvet lady's-jacket, with a fur lining of sable 
and borders of the same material, lies near at 
hand upon a divan. Although he is ordinarily 
good-natured, his anger is easily provoked by 
any disturbance during working hours. Com- 
position is mere play to him after he has begun, 



o. 

82 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 



but the first lines of a new work always are 
penned with difficulty. When he writes with- 
out an inclination, he is, as a rule, dissatisfied 
with the result. Generally he spends from 
three to four hours at the writing-desk and 
devotes the rest of the day to recreation. 

Dr. Julius Stinde, who is responsible for that 
excellent German satire, " Die Familie Buch- 
holz," never works by lamplight, if he can pos- 
sibly avoid it. He writes on large sheets, of 
quarto size, and never makes an outline ; the 
compositor gets the manuscript as it was writ- 
ten, with a few, but not many, alterations. 
Whatever is not satisfactory to the author is 
thrown into the waste-paper basket, which, in con- 
sequence, is pretty large. While at work he takes 
a pinch of snuff from time to time, which, he 
asserts, has a beneficial action on the eyes that 
are taxed by incessant study and composition. 
When he treats of scientific topics, a few glasses 
of Rhine wine tend to induce the proper mood ; 
he finds the " Johannisgarten," a wine grown at 
Musbach in the palatinate of the Rhine, es- 
pecially valuable for this purpose. He com- 
poses humorous work most easily after a very 
simple breakfast, consisting of tea and bread. 
He is in the habit of often changing the kinds 
of paper, pens, pen-holders, ink, and even ink- 
stands, which he uses ; and loves to see fresh 
flowers on his writing-desk. He writes with 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 83 

greater facility in fine, sunny weather than on 
dark, gloomy days. That is the reason why he 
prefers, on cloudy days, to write in the evening. 
He declares that he would rather stop writing 
for days and weeks than to compose without 
inclination, and he tells us that whenever he at- 
tempts to work " sans inclination" as the 
French say, the result is unsatisfactory, and the 
effort strains both mind and body. He sel- 
dom spends more than eight hours a day at the 
writing-table. 

To the many with whom it is customary to 
do literary work in the daytime must be added 
Johannes Nordmann, one of Vienna's most able 
novelists and newspaper men. He writes more 
during the winter than in the summer time, 
most of which he spends in travelling. He 
never recopies prose. For poems, however, 
he first makes an outline, and then files the 
verse till it receives his approbation. While 
driving the "quill," he smokes cigars. He 
writes with remarkable speed and ease after the 
subject in hand has ripened in his thoughts. 
He often forces himself to do newspaper work, 
when he would fain do anything else ; and is 
totally unable to compose fiction or poetry when 
not disposed to. 

Moncure D. Conway burns daylight, never 
the midnight oil, and rarely the evening oil. 
Generally he works with his pen eight hours a 



84 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

day, tries to take two walks, and in the evening 
to get some amusement, — billiards or the thea- 
tre, of which he is very fond. He smokes as 
he begins work, but does not keep it up, and 
uses no other stimulant at work. He loves 
work, and never has had to force himself to 
labor. He generally makes some outline of what 
he means to write, but often leaves it, finding 
his thoughts developed by stating them. Con- 
way has to be alone when writing, but does not 
care for noise outside of his study. He is a slow 
writer, and is always waiting on a nursery of 
slowly-maturing subjects. 

Kate Field, the well-known editor and lec- 
turer, prefers the daytime for literary work, 
for the reason, she says, that the brain is far 
clearer in the morning than at any other time. 
This refers, of course, to a normal brain, inde- 
pendent of stimulants. She thinks that, under 
pressure, night work in journalism is often 
more brilliant than any other ; but that it is 
exceptional. She makes no outline in advance ; 
and never uses stimulants, hot water excepted. 
She has no particular habit when at work, 
except the habit of sticking to it; and has no 
specified hours for work. She spends no time 
at a desk, as she writes in her lap, a habit 
which was also a peculiarity of Mrs. Browning. 
Miss Field maintains that it is far easier for 
her, and prevents round shoulders, and is also 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 85 

better for the lungs. She has forced herself to 
write at times, and does not believe in waiting 
for ideas "to turn up." 

E. Vely, one of the best of the female novel- 
ists of Germany, however, believes in inspira- 
tions, and does not take a pen in hand unless 
disposed to write. Four hours in the forenoon 
are spent in composition, while the afternoon 
and evening are given up to pastime, exercise, 
and study. While at work she hates to be in- 
terrupted, and insists upon absolute stillness 
about her. She always sends her original 
manuscript to the printer. 

And now we come to one who recently joined 
the great majority, one who, although he has 
gone the way of all mortals, still lives, whose 
name is not only found on the long list of the 
illustrious dead, but is also graven in golden 
letters on the record of the age : Dr. Alfred 
Meissner. It was his wont to do the imagi- 
native part of his work in the stillness of the 
night, either in an easy chair ■ — smoking a cigar 
— or in bed, in which he used to pass several 
hours sleepless almost every day. He used to 
sit down to write in the morning and quit at 
noon. Early in his literary career this distin- 
guished Austrian novelist discovered that com- 
position in the night-time, that is, the mechanical 
part of it, would not agree with him, that it was 
too great a strain on his nervous system, and 



86 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

so wisely concluded to write only by daylight. 
He was unable to comprehend how anybody 
could write a novel — a very intricate work — 
without making alterations and erasures subse- 
quently in the original manuscripts. It ap- 
peared to him as if an artist would not make 
a sketch of his projected picture first, but 
would begin immediately to paint in oil and 
make no changes afterward. He cited the 
example of Raphael and Titian, who, although 
they were talented artists, made numerous 
sketches before they began a painting. Dr. 
Meissner first made a detailed outline of his 
work, which he elaborated with great care. 
While copying this second manuscript he was 
enabled to make a great many alterations, and 
to strike out everything that was unsuitable. 
Practically every production of his pen was 
written three times. 

Sometimes Meissner would work with great 
ease, sometimes with difficulty. The composi- 
tion of chapters that were full of stirring inci- 
dents, violent passions, or perilous situations 
used to excite him intensely, and progressed by 
degrees ; whereas other chapters were written 
with great facility and swiftness. He wrote 
only when he was compelled to by his crea- 
tive faculty, that urged him to set down what 
he had to say. He was a very diligent author, 
and left many books to keep his memory green 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 87 

and constantly endear him to the hearts of the 
people. 

Dr. A. Glaser, the German novelist, dictates 
all his stories to a private secretary, a luxury 
which few Teutonic authors can afford. Ordi- 
narily he writes in the daytime, but when deeply 
interested in some new work he keeps right on 
till late at night. Music, especially classic 
music, exerts a great influence on the products 
of his pen. When his work progresses slowly, 
a complication is not easily solved, or a charac- 
ter becomes somewhat indistinct, music, that is, 
oratorios and symphonies, invariably sets all 
matters right and dispels all difficulties. He 
never writes with greater facility or rapidity 
than when he has heard the music of Handel, 
Bach, or Beethoven just before sitting down to 
write. 

What little literary work John Burroughs 
does is entirely contingent upon his health. 
If he is not feeling absolutely well, with a good 
appetite for his food, a good appetite for sleep, 
for the open air, for life generally, there is no 
literary work for him. If his sleep has been 
broken or insufficient, the day that follows is 
lost to his pen. He leads a sane and simple 
life : goes to bed at nine o'clock and gets up 
at five in summer and at six in winter; spends 
half of each day in the open air ; avoids tea and 
coffee, tobacco, and all stimulating drinks ; ad- 



55 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

heres mainly to a fruit and vegetable diet, and 
always aims to have something to do which he 
can do with zest. He is fond of the mild excite- 
ment of a congenial talk, of a conversation with 
friends, of a walk in the fields or woods, of a 
row on the river, of the reading of a good book. 
During working-hours he likes to regale him- 
self with good buttermilk, in which, he avers, 
there is great virtue. He writes for the most 
part only in fall and winter ; writing best when 
his chimney draws best. He composes only 
when writing is play. His working hours, when 
he does write, are from nine or ten A. M. to 
two or three P. M. Then he wants his dinner, 
and after that a brisk walk of four or five miles, 
rain or shine. In the evening he reads or talks 
with his friends. 

When Charles Deslys, the French novelist, 
begins to write he has a very indistinct idea of 
what he is about to compose ; but after a while, 
becoming interested in the work, he writes with 
increasing pleasure, and the clouds which shut 
out the subject from view quickly clear away. 
He never makes an outline beforehand. He 
does not use stimulating drinks, but smokes 
much ; and seldom works more than four or five 
hours at a time. At Nice, where he spends his 
winters now, he writes all the morning, from eight 
o'clock until noon, at the window, which is 
opened wide to let in the sunlight. In summer 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 89 

he always works in the open air, preferably at 
the seashore or in the woods. In this way he 
composed his first romances, novels, and songs, 
writing them down first in a note-book, which he 
always carried with him. Sometimes he dic- 
tated to a secretary. He has lost that faculty, 
and now must write down everything himself, 
either at his table or his writing-desk. 

John Fiske, the evolutionist, describes him- 
self as follows : — 

" I am forty-three years old ; six feet in height, 
girth of chest, forty-six inches ; waist, forty-four 
inches; head, twenty-four inches; neck, eighteen 
inches ; arm, sixteen inches ; weight, 240 pounds ; 
complexion, florid; hair, auburn; beard, red." 

Professor Fiske is a fine specimen of man- 
hood : he is alert and active, possesses a vora- 
cious appetite, a perfect digestion, and ability to 
sleep soundly. He works by day or night indif- 
ferently. His method, like General Grant's, is 
to "keep hammering." Sometimes he makes 
an outline first ; but scarcely ever changes a 
word once written. He very seldom tastes cof- 
fee or wine, or smokes a cigar; but he drinks 
beer freely, and smokes tobacco in a meerschaum 
pipe nearly all the time when at work. He has 
been in the habit of working from twelve to fifteen 
hours daily since he was twelve years old. 
John Fiske is one of the healthiest of men, and 
never has a headache or physical discomfort of 



90 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

any sort. He prefers to work in a cold room, 
55 to 6o° F., and always sits in a draft when he 
can find one. He wears the thinnest clothes he 
can find, both in winter and summer. Despite 
this absence of precautions, he catches cold 
only once in three or four years, and then not se- 
verely. He never experienced the feeling of 
disinclination for work, and, therefore, has never 
had to force himself. If he feels at all dull when 
at work, he restores himself by a half-hour at 
the piano. 

Ernest Wichert, who, besides being an hon- 
ored member of the bar of Germany, is a cele- 
brated novelist, courts the muses from eight 
o'clock in the morning until two in the after- 
noon. After five P. M. he attends to his 
correspondence and daily professional duties. 
Only two forenoons in the week are taken up by 
his duties as judge of the superior court at 
Koenigsberg, Prussia. He never copies a 
romance or novel once written, but leaves a 
margin for alterations and additions. When 
a sentence — not a judicial one — presents any 
difficulty, he writes it out hastily on a small 
piece of paper before he puts it down in the 
manuscript. He is in the habit of revising and 
copying dramatic work at least three times 
before he submits it to a stage-manager. He is 
very much addicted to the use of tobacco, and 
smokes a pipe and a cigar alternately. He 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. gi 

smokes at all times of the»day, even during 
working-hours. Generally he sits down to 
write ; but cannot bear to have a pen in hand 
when thinking about the subject of his work. 
He is accustomed to walk up and down the 
room until his thoughts have assumed a definite 
form. He works sometimes from five to six 
hours successively. He cannot write when 
anybody is in the room, and, therefore, always 
locks the doors before he sits down to his 
work. Literary labor is such a necessity to 
Wichert that he invariably feels uncomfortable 
when he has finished one work without begin- 
ning another immediately. 

Many of the friends of Jules Claretie, 
the famous novelist, often are at a loss 
to account for his great fertility, and cannot 
see how he manages to do all that he succeeds 
in doing. When this question was once asked 
of the author, he replied, smilingly : " I am used 
to working, love to work, and work regularly — 
without excess, and with constant pleasure. 
Work is, with certain natures, one of the forms 
of health." Claretie's pen is put in motion only 
in the daytime ; at night it rests, like the genial 
man himself. When the author feels indisposed, 
he does not write except for journals to which 
matter must be supplied on a certain date ; at- 
tacks of neuralgia and nervous headache often 
interfere with his work. When at work he is 



92 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

in the habit of humming various tunes without 
being conscious of it. When work is easy to 
him, he sings ; but when it is difficult, a dead si- 
lence reigns in his study. Sometimes work 
proves exceedingly hard to be done in the be- 
ginning, but the longer he writes the easier it. 
becomes. Claretie notes down all ideas that 
come to his mind, utilizing them afterward for 
his novels. He also makes a detailed outline 
of his romances ; but his journalistic articles are 
composed at the point of the pen. He is a very 
fast writer, and the ink on one page is often not 
quite dry before another is begun. 

Hermann Rollet, a distinguished Austrian 
author, writes on scientific topics in the evening 
as well as in the day-time. With him poetry is 
evolved, almost without exception, in the dead 
of night, when he lies awake after having slept 
a few hours. He invariably makes an outline, 
and when his manuscript is finished he im- 
proves it as much as possible. There must be 
no noise in the room where he works ; outside 
din, however, does not affect him. When Rol- 
let has a clear conception of the subject in 
hand, work is mere play to him ; otherwise, it 
is difficult indeed. The author has one great 
peculiarity, which is seldom met with, and 
has, I think, never been noted before. When 
composing poetry, it appears to him as if he 
only removes by the act of writing the cov- 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 93 

ering from something that has been concealed, 
and he looks upon the resulting poem as if 
he had not produced it, as if it had been in 
existence before, and as if he had but re- 
vealed it. Thus generally his best songs are 
produced. Sometimes he dreams of a poem, 
verse for verse, line for line. If he happens to 
wake up at the time, and strikes a light, he is 
able to write down literally the poem of which 
he dreamt. Frequently he forgets all about his 
dream after it is written down, and is then 
grdlttly astonished in the morning to find a 
finished poem on his writing-table. He says 
that he could more easily split wood or break 
stones than to write without inclination. He 
has to force himself merely to copy what he has 
written. 



VI. 
Favorite Habits of Work. 

John G. Whittier, our noble Quaker poet, 
used to say that he never had any method. 
" When I felt like it," he said once, " I wrote, 
and I neither had the health nor the patience 
to work afterward over what I had written. It 
usually went as it was originally completed." 

Whittier preferred the daytime — and the 
morning, in fact — for writing, and used no 
stimulants whatever for literary labor. He 
made no outline or skeleton of his work — and 
claimed that his verses were made as the Irish- 
man made his chimney — by holding up one 
brick and putting another under. He was sub- 
ject to nervous headache all his life, and for this 
reason often had to force himself to work when 
he would rather have rested, especially while 
he was associate editor of the National Era 
and other papers. 

Philipp Galen, the German novelist, composes 
during the daytime, and sometimes labors till 
ten o'clock in the evening. He makes an 
outline of his story before he prepares the 
" copy " for the press. He requires no stimu- 
lants at work, but when he is through he rel- 
ishes a glass of wine. He has a habit of per- 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 95 

ambulating the room when engaged in medita- 
tion about a new book, and he writes with re- 
markable rapidity. He never puts pen to paper 
without inclination, because, as he says, he 
always feels disposed to do literary work. 
Formerly he worked daily from twelve to four- 
teen hours ; now he spends only from six to 
eight hours at the writing-desk every day. 

W. D. Howells always keeps his manuscript 
six or seven months ahead of the time for pub- 
lication. Being of a nervous disposition, he 
could not rely on himself to furnish matter at 
short notice. When it is possible, he com- 
pletes a book before giving a page of it to a 
magazine. He finds the morning to be the best 
time for brain-labor. He asserts that the first 
half of the day is the best part of a man's life, 
and always selects it for his working hours. He 
usually begins at nine and stops at one, and 
manages in that time to write about a dozen 
manuscript pages. After that he enjoys his 
leisure ; that is, he reads, corrects proof, walks 
about, and pays visits. When he went to 
Venice as the United States consul he soon 
threw off the late-hour habits to which he was 
accustomed as a journalist There was so 
little to keep him employed, and the neighbor- 
hood was so quiet and delightful, that he began 
doing his work in the morning, and he has con- 
tinued the habit ever since. He does not gen- 



9& METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

erally make a " skeleton " of his work ; in fact, 
he almost never does. He says that he leans 
toward indolence, and always forces himself 
more or less to work, keeping from it as long 
as he can invent any excuse. He often works 
when he is dull or heavy from a bad night, and 
finds that the indisposition wears off. Howells 
rarely misses a day from any cause, and, for 
a lazy man, as he calls himself, is extremely 
industrious. 

Georgiana M. Craik never, except on the 
rarest occasions, wrote at night. She did not 
always make an^ outline of her books before- 
hand, but generally did so. She wrote from 
nine A. M. until two P. M. in winter, and in 
summer she seldom wrote at all. When she 
once began to write a book, she worked at it 
steadily four or five hours every day, without 
any regard to inclination. 

Dr. Alfred Friedmann, a witty Austrian 
journalist, writes his brilliant articles at one 
sitting. He makes few corrections, and, some- 
times, before the ink is dry on the " copy," off 
it goes to the printer. Whenever he feels in 
need of refreshment, he gets up from his writ- 
ing-desk and has recourse to a wine-bottle near 
by. He never performs literary labor unless 
he is inclined to work. Sometimes he does 
not write for weeks, and then again he writes 
half a book at a time. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 97 

J. Scherr, the noted professor of the Univer- 
sity of Zurich, Switzerland, who is a novelist as 
well as an historian, spends his forenoon at his 
writing-desk. He works standing, and writes, 
when in good health, with wonderful facility. 
Formerly, he often used to work as long as ten 
hours, but now he devotes only three or four 
hours a day to literary work. 

Thomas Wentworth Higginson composes 
always in the daytime, never at night. He 
sometimes makes an outline. He uses no 
stimulants while at work, or at any time. He 
writes for from three to five hours a day. He 
sometimes forces himself to " drive the quill," 
but rarely, generally enjoying literary work very 
much. 

Ludwig Auzengruber, the Austrian story- 
teller, never writes at night. He always makes 
an outline of his work at the beginning, and is 
addicted to tobacco, which he consumes when at 
work. He is in the habit of walking up and 
down the room when elaborating a new story, 
and never writes down a sentence before he 
has pronounced it aloud. Auzengruber is a 
very industrious man, and sometimes writes for 
as many as eleven hours a day. 

Gerhard von Amyntor, who is one of the best 
known of German authors, is also a very diligent 
writer. He composes for from three to four 
hours every morning, but rarely in the evening, 



98 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

and never at night. The afternoon and evening 
are spent in reading or conversation, or in re- 
vising that which he has written in the forenoon. 
He never makes a skeleton of his work, but his 
manuscripts are copied before they reach the 
printer. Tobacco is indispensable to him when 
he is producing poetry. He works standing, 
and in solitude. The production, in the mind, 
of novels and fiction generally is easy to him, 
but the mechanical labor of writing down the 
product of his imagination he deems sad 
drudgery, because he is affected by writers' 
cramp, and he never sets pen to paper unless 
he feels disposed to. 

Walt Whitman closely adhered to his home 
and rooms. His income was just sufficient to 
make both ends meet, but he used to say it was 
adequate to the wants of a poet. He declared 
that wealth and luxury would destroy his work- 
ing force. The poet once wrote : " Twelve 
years ago I came to Camden to die ; but every 
day I went into the country, and, naked, bathed 
in sunshine, lived with the birds and the 
squirrels, and played in the water with the 
fishes. I recovered my health from Nature. 
Strange how she carries us through periods of 
infirmity, into the realms of freedom and health." 

In contradistinction to the majority of authors, 
Hermann Herberg, German novelist and jour- 
nalist, drives the pen at night. He invariably 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 99 

makes an outline of his work to start with, and 
when he is engaged in writing, he sips coffee and 
smokes. To him literary work is a holiday 
task; yet he never writes unless he is in the 
proper frame of mind, spending on the average 
three hours a day at the writing table. 

The method of Louisa May Alcott was a very 
simple one. She never had a study; and an 
old atlas on her knee was all the desk she 
cared for. Any pen, any paper, any ink, and 
any quiet place contented her. Years ago, 
when necessity drove her hard, she used to sit 
for fourteen hours at her work, doing about 
thirty pages a day, and scarcely tasting food 
until her daily task was done. She never 
copied. When the idea was in her head, it 
flowed into words faster than she could write 
them down, and she seldom altered a line. 
She had the wonderful power of carrying a 
dozen plots for months in her mind, thinking 
them over whenever she was in the mood, to be 
developed at the proper time. Sometimes she 
carried a plan thus for years. Often, in the 
dead of night, she lay awake and planned whole 
chapters, word for word, and when daylight 
came she had only to write them down. She 
never composed in the evening. She main- 
tained that work in the early hours gives morn- 
ing freshness to both brain and pen, and that 
rest at night is a necessity for all who do brain 



tOO METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

work. She never used stimulants of any kind. 
She ate sparingly when writing, and only the 
simplest food, holding that one cannot preach 
temperance if one does not practice it. Miss 
Alcott affirmed that the quality of an author's 
work depends much on his habits, and that 
sane, wholesome, happy, and wise books must 
come from clean lives, well-balanced minds, 
spiritual insight, and a desire to do good. 

Very few of the stories of the author of 
" Little Women " were written in Concord, her 
home. This peaceful, pleasant place, the fields 
of which are classic ground, utterly lacked in- 
spiration for Miss Alcott. She called it " this 
dull town," and when she had a story to write 
she went to Boston, where she shut herself up 
in a room, and' emerged only when she could 
show a completed work. • 

August Niemann, the German novelist, de- 
votes the forenoon to literary work, but never 
burns midnight-oil on his writing-desk. He 
prepares his manuscript at the outset for the 
press, never making a plan beforehand. He 
writes with great facility, but only when he feels 
like it ; when disinclined, he does not touch a 
pen — sometimes he will not write for weeks. 
When he is especially interested in a topic, he 
is apt to write for from four to six hours at a 
stretch; ordinarily he spends two, or, at the 
most, three, hours a day at the writing-table. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. IOI 

Victor Bliithgen, one of the most noted 
German authors, prefers the daytime, especially 
the early morning, for literary labor ; and 
whenever he is compelled to work at night, in 
order to meet engagements, he does so after 
ten o'clock. He never makes a skeleton of his 
work, but when the manuscript is completed, 
he files away at it, and even makes alterations 
in the proof-sheets. While at work he smokes 
incessantly, and is so accustomed to the stimu- 
lating effects of tobacco that he cannot get 
along without it. He walks up and down the 
room while meditating on the plots of his 
stories. When he elaborates them everything 
must be quiet about him, for every loud noise, 
especially music, agitates him, and renders 
work impossible. Bliithgen is a ready writer, 
and conception and composition are both easy 
to him. He always forces himself to write. 
When he is beginning, he struggles hard to 
overcome his repugnance, until he is interested 
in the work, when he composes with increasing 
pleasure and rapidity. On the average, he 
writes for from three to six hours daily, but 
never more than three hours at a time. When 
he sits down to the desk he has but a faint idea 
of the novel which he is about to write, being in- 
capable of working out the details of a story in 
his mind, as some authors are able to do; but 
with the ink the thoughts begin to flow, and all 
difficulties are surmounted. 



102 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

Lucy Larcom declared that she never thought 
of herself as an author, and during most of her 
life her occupation was that of a teacher. She 
wrote always before she taught, and in the 
intervals of leisure she had, — she used to say 
because her head and pen would not keep still. 
She always wished for more leisure to write, 
but was obliged to do something that insured 
an immediate return in money, — in fact, she 
had always to " work for a living." So, it was 
her habit to take a book or a portfolio in her lap, 
and write when and where she could. She did 
not write at night, because, she said, she had 
learned that she must sleep. She often forced 
herself to write, sometimes through an entire 
day, although the result was not usually so 
satisfactory to herself. She used to keep writ- 
ing, even if she felt a little ill and tired, because 
of the imperative " must," and because she 
could forget her bad feelings in her subject. 
She began to write as a little child, — verses 
chiefly, — and always preferred writing to doing 
anything else. Most of the things she wrote 
seemed to her to come of themselves, poems 
especially. 

To the large number of those who prefer the 
daytime to the artificial light of the evening or 
the night must be added Rudolf von Gottschall, 
German historian, novelist, and essayist. While 
at work he is in the habit — that is at times — 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. I03 

of chewing paper. He writes with ease and 
great speed. He often composes when disin- 
clined to work, compelled by his occupation as 
a critic and journalist. Only when he is writ- 
ing poetry he must be in good spirits. He de- 
votes about five hours a day to literary work, 
exclusive of letter-writing and the discharge of 
his editorial duties. 

Before committing her manuscripts to the 
press, the novelist, Marian Tenger (a pseu- 
donym which stands for the name of a lady of 
the highest German aristocracy ), reads them 
over repeatedly, and makes many alterations. 
It seems incredible to her that any author, who 
is attached to his profession, should write fair 
copy at once, making no skeleton of his work 
whatever. She invents dialogues most easily 
when she is perambulating the room. When 
disinclined to write, she refrains from touching 
a pen. Sometimes weeks elapse before she re- 
sumes her usual occupation — writing; but 
when she does so, it is with delight. She never 
writes for more than five hours daily. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes prefers the morning 
from nine o'clock until noon for work. He 
used to write evenings, but of late he has not 
done so. He sometimes plans his work before- 
hand, but is apt to deviate more or less from 
the outline he has laid down. He uses no 
stimulants at his work, unless his cup of coffee 



104 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

is so considered. He spends sometimes two or 
three, sometimes four or five, hours a day at his 
writing-table. He very often forces himself to 
write when he has an uncompleted task before 
him. He must have a pen in his hand when he 
is composing in prose or verse — it seems a 
kind of conductor, without which his thoughts 
will not flow continuously in proper order. 

Julius Wolffe, the German poet, belongs to 
those who never work at night. He writes from 
early in the morning until the late hours of the 
afternoon. He makes an outline, which, how- 
ever, is almost equivalent to fair copy, since 
very few additions and alterations are . ever 
made. While at work he moderately smokes 
cigars. When he is absorbed in cogitation on 
a subject in hand, he often walks up and down 
his room. He writes with great facility, for he 
never treats of topics that are not congenial to 
him. He is a very industrious man; every day 
finds him at his writing-desk, where he spends 
from eight to nine hours out of the twenty-four. 

The work of Edmund Gosse being multiform 
and very pressing, he has no choice between 
the daytime and the night, and must use both. 
The central hours of the day being given up to 
his official business for the government, which 
consists of translation from the various European 
languages, only the morning and the evening 
remain for literary work. His books have 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 105 

mainly been written between eight and eleven 
P. M., and corrected for the press between nine 
and ten A. M. He finds the afternoon almost 
a useless time. In his estimation, the physical 
clockwork of the twenty-four hours seems to 
run down about four P. M., — at least, such is his 
experience. He makes no written skeleton or 
first draft. His first draft is what goes to the 
printers, and commonly with very few altera- 
tions. He rounds off his sentences in his head 
before committing them to paper. He uses no 
stimulant at work. He drinks wine twice a day, 
but after dinner he neither eats nor drinks. He 
has found this habit essential to his health 
and power of work. The only exception he 
makes is that, as he is closing for the night, — a 
little before eleven o'clock, — he takes several 
cups of very strong tea, which he has proved by 
experience to be by far the best sedative for his 
nerves. If he goes to bed immediately after 
this strong tea, at the close of a hard day's 
work, he generally sleeps soundly almost as soon 
as his head is on the pillow. Coffee keeps him 
awake, and so does alcohol. He has tried 
doing without wine, but has always returned to 
it with benefit. He has entirely given up 
tobacco, which never suited him. He can work 
anywhere, if he is not distracted. He has no 
difficulty in writing in unfamiliar places — the 
waiting-room of a railway station or a rock on 



106 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

the seashore suits him as well (except for 
the absence of books of reference ) as the 
desk in his study. He cannot do literary or 
any other brain-work for more than three 
hours on a stretch, and believes that a man who 
will work three hours of every working-day will 
ultimately appear to have achieved a stupen- 
dous result in bulk, if this is an advantage. 
But, then, he must be rapid while he is at work, 
and must not fritter away his resources on 
starts in vain directions. Gosse is utterly un- 
able to write to order, — that is to say, on every 
occasion. He can generally write, but there 
are occasions when for weeks together he is 
conscious of an invincible disinclination, and 
this he never opposes. Consequently, he is by 
temperament unfitted for journalism, in which 
he has, he thinks, happily, never been obliged 
to take any part. As for Mr. Gosse's verse, it 
gets itself written at odd times, wholly without 
rule or precedent, and, of course, cannot be sub- 
mitted to rule. But his experience is that the 
habit of regular application is beneficial to the 
production of prose. 

Felix Dahn, whose fertile fancy conjures up 
romances of life in ancient Rome, always writes 
by the light of day. He writes with great facil- 
ity and rapidity ; and devotes nine hours a day 
to literary work. His manuscript goes to the 
printer as it is originally composed, and he sel- 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 07 

dom alters a line after it is once committed to 
paper. 

Albert Traeger, a celebrated German poet, 
writes in the afternoon, — after three o'clock, by- 
preference. When composing prose, he writes 
fair copy at once ; for poems, however, he makes 
an outline, which is hardly ever altered, since he 
completes every line in his head before he writes 
it down. While at work he constantly smokes 
very strong cigars, and is in the habit of sipping 
black coffee from time to time. The poet is a 
ready writer, but never pens a single sentence 
unless he feels disposed to work. Sometimes 
months pass before he takes up the neglected 
pen again. 

That excellent writer of short stories, Sarah 
Orne Jewett, composes in the afternoon. She 
does not make a formal outline of her work, but 
has a rough plan of it in her own head, depend- 
ing most upon a knowledge of the chief charac- 
ters. She writes for about four hours a day, 
and often finds the first ten or fifteen minutes' 
work an effort, but after that she can almost 
always go on easily. 

Thomas Hardy prefers the night for working, 
but finds the use of daytime advisable, as a 
rule. He follows no plan as to outline, and uses 
no stimulant excepting tea. His habit is to 
remove boots or slippers as a preliminary to 
work. He has no definite hours for writing, 
and only occasionally works against his will. 



108 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

W. H. Riehl, who, besides being a professor at 
the University of Munich, is a famous novelist, 
always writes by daylight. He carefully out- 
lines his work beforehand, and repeatedly re- 
vises it before it is printed. When engaged in 
the labor of composition, he smokes one cigar 
— no more. He invents easily, but is very 
painstaking when writing down his thoughts, 
mercilessly erasing whatever does not suit him. 
He takes a pen to hand whenever he has a 
leisure moment, sometimes in the morning, 
sometimes in the afternoon, as circumstances 
permit. 

The renowned divine, Karl Gersk, who is the 
author of by far the best German religious 
poems, as a rule makes an outline before com- 
posing poetry, but writes down prose at once. 
When his attention is taken up by an interesting 
topic, he is in the habit of curling, absent- 
mindedly, one of his occipital locks about the 
left index finger. He rarely writes for more 
than six hours a day, and then only when he 
feels especially disposed to work. 

The author of " St. Olave " always writes in 
the daytime; namely, from nine A. M. to one P. 
M. ; and does not make any outline first, but 
only two copies, which are improved afterward, 
the first copy being written in pencil, and the 
second in ink. The second manuscript is re- 
vised and corrected. Day by day, this knight 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. IO9 

of the pen writes during the stated time, unless 
prevented by illness or unexpected engagements, 
and does not wait for "feeling disposed," but 
goes steadily on. 

R. E. Francillon prefers working at night, 
when both ideas and words come most fluently. 
He always works at night, and sometimes all 
night, when he works against time. He has not 
then to conquer an unwillingness to work which 
besets him at other hours. Next to the night- 
time, he prefers the afternoon, to which circum- 
stances practically confine him. This refers to 
imaginative work. With regard to journalistic 
and critical work and study, it is just the re- 
verse, and he prefers the morning. He never 
makes a skeleton of his work. He has tried 
the skeleton method, but found it useless, and 
broke away from it soon after starting. He 
finds that incident suggests incident, and char- 
acters develop themselves. Of course, he starts 
with a motive ( in the technical sense ), and a 
general drift and color, and the salient points 
of leading characters. He uses no stimulant 
when at work, except tobacco in the form of 
cigarettes, which he smokes all the time, what- 
ever he is doing, even when writing a letter. 
Pen and cigarette are inseparable ; but he 
smokes very little when not working, and next 
to nothing when taking a holiday. His hours 
of work depend very much on necessity. He 



IIO METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

is engaged on a newspaper from nine A. M. till 
one P. M. The afternoon and evening are 
devoted to fiction or whatever other work he 
has on hand. Practically he is at his desk all 
day, an industry which is rendered possible by 
frequent change of work. He constantly forces 
himself to work, dead against inclination; and, 
though it may seem strange, it constantly hap- 
pens that the less the original inclination, the 
better the result, and vice versa. Francillon has 
no faith whatever in writing upon inclination, 
and maintains that even if little comes of work- 
ing when disinclined, the little is something 
and prevents the want of inclination lasting, be- 
sides preventing one from yielding easily. He 
is perfectly indifferent to outside noise, and, in- 
deed, to almost everything that most people find 
a trial to the nerves — except conversation in 
the same room. He has worked with music 
playing in the same room, and has not even 
noticed it. 

Hubert H. Bancroft, the historian of the 
Pacific coast, works day and evening, with little 
interruption, except as he takes a walk or rides 
for exercise occasionally in the afternoon. He 
determines that a certain amount of work shall 
be accomplished within so many hours, days, 
and weeks, and so is always stimulated and 
successfully accomplishes the allotted task. He 
frequently writes when not disposed to work. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. Ill 

Richard Schmidt Cabanis, the German humor- 
ist, has often spent whole nights at the writing- 
desk. When composing poetry he makes an 
outline beforehand, otherwise not. Before his 
manuscript goes to press he carefully revises it 
and strikes out a great deal. He is very fond 
of French red wine, which he imbibes occasion- 
ally when writing, but which he must often 
forego in obedience to the advice of his physi- 
cians. The only peculiarity of which he is 
possessed is that he cannot compose unless he 
is alone, and he scorns even dumb company 
during working hours. 

Margaret Eytinge very much prefers the 
morning for writing, and generally spends from 
eight o'clock until eleven or twelve at her 
desk. Of course, she often works in the after- 
noon, and sometimes, though very rarely, at 
night. But at those times she only revises and 
copies. She makes a slight sketch of her poem 
or story first — a sketch written so hastily that 
it would be impossible for anybody but herself 
to decipher it, and she has found trouble in 
making it out herself at times. Then she 
proceeds to clothe this skeleton, an operation 
which is never completed satisfactorily until 
after at least three times trying. She always 
makes it a point to produce clean manuscripts. 
She cannot write at all with people about her, 
or in an unfamiliar place, and must be in her 



112 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

own room, at her own desk, and secure from 
interruption. 

That astute author of innumerable novels, 
Charlotte M. Yonge, never works at night. She 
does not write any outline of her tales. She has 
such an outline in her mind, but is guided by 
the way the characters shape themselves. She 
generally composes from about 10.30 A. M. to 
1.30 P. M., taking odd times later in the day 
for proofs and letters. Having good health, she 
is seldom indisposed for work; if she is, she 
takes something mechanical, such as translating 
or copying. 

Dr. Karl Frenzel, editor of one of the leading 
Berlin newpapers, has to struggle hard at first 
to overcome his unwillingness to compose, but 
after he has written for some time any aversion 
which he may have experienced disappears. He 
rarely works at night, never after midnight, but 
prefers the evening to the afternoon for liter- 
ary production. He sometimes rewrites whole 
pages of his novels two or three times, but 
never makes a plan beforehand. He has the 
queer habit of making bread pellets while at 
work; that is, whenever he is absorbed in 
thought. He writes with facility and swift- 
ness, devoting from three to four hours a day 
to literary labor. 

Dr. Otto Franz Gensichen, German drama- 
tist, poet, and essayist, always writes in the 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 113 

daytime, almost exclusively in the forenoon, 
from eight till twelve o'clock; He makes an 
exception in the case of lyrical poems, which, 
of course, must be written down whenever they 
occur to the mind. After his manuscript is 
done, he polishes it here and there, and then 
copies it; for while slowly transcribing he 
can most easily detect mistakes. While at 
work in the morning he smokes a mild cigar, 
which is, however, sometimes omitted. When 
writing, he likes to have as much light and 
silence about him as he can possibly attain. 
While the manuscript lies on the writing table, 
and the author is meditating on the subject in 
hand, he is in the habit of pacing up and down 
the room. At first he repeats the words aloud 
to test their euphonism and smoothness ; he 
then commits the spoken words to paper. He 
can boast of himself that he has never written a 
line " invita Musa" without being fully inclined 
to composition. Sometimes he does not write 
for months, but when the proper mood takes 
possession of him, he is very industrious. Even 
then, however, he does most of his work before 
midday, and, exceptionally, from five till eight 
in the afternoon. As he is a bachelor and 
given up altogether to authorship, he is governed 
entirely by his moods. 

Paul Burani, the brilliant Parisian journalist 
and dramatist, is forty years of age, married 



1 14 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

and father of one daughter, — Michelette, — owner 
of the house he lives in, and, altogether, the 
perfect type of a successful literarian. Before 
writing a play, he makes a very elaborate out- 
line, which is developed afterward. Ordinarily 
he rewrites a play three times, but being both 
a ready and a rapid writer, the task is quickly 
accomplished. When compelled to stop writ- 
ing in consequence of fatigue or a lack of inter- 
est, he takes up something else, promenades in 
his garden, or smokes a cigar. He is indiffer- 
ent to noise, and can compose almost anywhere. 
The great number of books which he has writ- 
ten has given him the reputation of being one 
of the most productive authors of the times, but 
he does not write for more than five or six hours 
a day. 

Ludwig Habicht, a German novelist, loves to 
write by the light of the sun, and invariably 
works in the daytime, never at night. When 
his manuscript is finished and corrected, he has 
it copied by a professional copyist, whereupon 
it goes to the compositor. Habicht prefers to 
write in the open air, and does not use a writ- 
ing-desk. The duration of his working hours 
depends entirely upon his health and moods, 
but he never writes for more than four or five 
hours a day ; and sometimes does not pen a line 
for months. 

Formerly, when the world — that is to say, the 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. II5 

German world — used to know Karl Stelter, the 
poet, as a merchant, he was in the habit of 
spending his leisure hours in the evening in the 
production of poetry, and, strange though it may 
seem, his best poems were made after a hard 
day's work. Now, since he has retired from 
business and is in prosperous circumstances, 
he versifies whenever and wherever he wants 
to, in the evening as well as in the daytime. 
He writes his poems with a lead pencil, and 
polishes them for weeks before they are pub- 
lished. He works with great ease, and is a 
ready improviser ; but he never writes against 
his inclination. 

Brander Matthews does his work between 
breakfast and lunch, as a rule ; and works at 
night only occasionally. He makes elaborate 
notes, and then writes at white heat, revising at 
his leisure. 

Andre Theuriet, the Parisian novelist, makes 
an outline of his work first ; he delineates each 
chapter of his novel, indicating the situations, 
personages, dialogues, and so on. Thereupon 
the novel soon assumes a definite form. Theu- 
riet spends six hours a day at his writing-desk, 
but always in the morning. He does not be- 
lieve in night work. In the afternoon he revises 
the work of the previous day. During working 
hours the author drinks two cups of tea and 
smokes one or two pipes of tobacco. Theuriet 



Il6 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

retires early in the evening, between ten and 
eleven o'clock, and rises in the morning at a 
quarter before six. This regular mode of life 
explains why the novelist is able to write so 
much, and is a key to the productiveness which 
has astonished his contemporaries. 

Paul Lindau, another German novelist, critic, 
and journalist, dictates a great deal, sometimes 
without inclination, and sometimes after hasty 
lead-pencil sketches. When he writes himself 
only one manuscript is made. He incessantly 
smokes cigarettes while at work. Only when 
he has labored uninterruptedly a long time does 
he refresh himself with coffee, tea, wine, and 
water. As a rule, Lindau writes with ease. He 
declares that dictating tires him out more than if 
he should write himself, but by dictation he is 
enabled to do twice as much work as he could 
otherwise accomplish. Generally, he writes 
for from four to five hours a day, but sometimes 
he has spent ten or even eleven hours in literary 
work. 

A. v. Winterfeld, the German humorist, 
devotes the day only to literary work. His 
original manuscript is committed to the press, 
for he never copies what he has written. He 
composes with great ease and swiftness, and 
spends four hours a day at the writing-desk. 

Hector Malot, the Parisian novelist, makes 
an outline of his romances beforehand, faintly 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. I I 7 

indicating all important incidents of his work. 
He does not take stimulating drinks, either 
when at work or when at rest ; with him the work 
itself acts as a stimulant. He rises at five 
o'clock in the morning, and writes till eleven. 
After breakfast he takes a walk. At two 
o'clock in the afternoon he resumes work and 
keeps at it until seven o'clock in the evening ; 
but he never composes at night. Nine months 
of the year are devoted to literary labor, but the 
remaining three months he spends in travel, 
study, and recreation. 

Victorien Sardou, the dramatist, writes his 
play twice ; first on little scraps of paper, then 
on foolscap. The first draft, when it is finished, 
is a maze of alterations and delineations. 

Mezerai, the famous historian, used to study 
and write by candle-light, even at noonday in 
summer, and, as if theie had been no sun in the 
world, always waited upon his company to the 
door with a candle in his hand. 

" The method of Buckle, the historian," so 
says his biographer, " was chiefly remarkable 
for careful, systematic industry, and punctilious 
accuracy. His memory appeared to be almost 
faultless, yet he took as much precaution against 
failure as if he dared not trust it. He invariably 
read with " paper and pencil in his hand, making 
copious references for future consideration. 
How laboriously this system was acted upon 



Il8 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

can be appreciated only by those who have seen 
his note-books, in which the passages so marked 
during his reading were either copied or re- 
ferred to under proper heads. Volume after 
volume was thus filled, everything being written 
with the same precise neatness that characterizes 
his manuscript for the press, and indexed with 
care, so that immediate reference might be made 
to any topic. But, carefully as these extracts 
and references were made, there was not a quo- 
tation in one of the copious notes that accom- 
panied his work that was not verified by collation 
with the original from which it was taken." 

Joaquin Miller says that he has always been 
so poor, or, rather, has had so many depending 
on his work, that he has " never been able to in- 
dulge the luxury of habits," and that he has 
worked in a sort of " catch-as-catch-can " way. 
Having been mostly on the wing since he began 
writing, he has done his work in all kinds of 
ways, and hours, and houses. However, now, 
since he has a little home, his life has become 
regulated. He rises at daylight, so as to 
save candles, and never works at night. After 
he has made and imbibed his coffee, he digs or 
pulls weeds, and cultivates his flowers, or works 
in some way about the greens, for an hour or 
so, and at length, when he feels compelled to 
literary work, and can no longer keep from it, he 
writes whatever he feels that he must set down ; 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. II9 

and then he writes only as long as he feels im- 
pelled. Holding, as he does, that all modern 
authors think too little and write too much, he 
never writes as long as he can keep from it. 
He looks forward with hope and pleasure to 
the day when he shall be able to stop writing 
entirely. As for stimulants, he never takes 
them. .Yet he often smokes a cigar about the 
greens before beginning work. But he would 
be ill if he attempted to drink while writing. 
As for making an outline of his work, he gener- 
ally jots down a lot of sketches or pictures, one 
each day ; then he puts these together, and the 
play, poem, or novel is finished. He works for 
from three to five hours every day, then goes 
out till dinner time. He once lived in a rude 
log cabin, built on an eminence overlooking the 
city of Washington, D. C. There his latch- 
string was always out. He now lives near Oak- 
land, Calif., not in one cabin, but in three, each 
as rude as that of any settler in the Sierras. 

George Manville Fenn, during a period of 
some eighteen years, has tried a good many 
plans, with the result of settling down for the 
last twelve or fourteen years to one alone. He 
prefers the daytime decidedly for mental work, 
because the brain is fresh and vigorous from 
the rest of the past few hours, and because the 
work produced is lighter and better and can be 
sustained longer; and the writer is not ex- 



120 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

hausted when he leaves his table. Brilliant 
work has often been done at night: but when 
Fenn has made the trial he has found the re- 
sults of a month's day-work better, and there 
has been more in quantity. He invariably makes 
an outline or skeleton of his work, and often 
with his story first in a dramatic form, which, 
he thinks, adds much to the vigor and effect of 
a tale. He is in the habit of using tobacco, but 
has never looked upon it as a stimulus, regard- 
ing it rather as a soothing aid to reflection. 
He dines early, so as to have the evenings free. 
The afternoon is spent in work, a visit to town, 
or a chat with friends ; he takes tea early, — at 
six, — and afterward often writes for two or 
three hours. For years Mr. Fenn has been try- 
ing to solve this problem : Why can one write 
easily and fairly well one day, and have the next 
be almost a blank ? After long study and much 
musing, he has come to the detemination that 
he knows nothing whatever about it, and that 
the only thing to do is to lead as quiet and tem- 
perate a life as one can. Of course, the stimu- 
lated and excited brain will produce a few weird 
and powerful bits of work ; but, judging from 
what Mr. Fenn has seen, the loaded mind soon 
breaks down. 



VII. 
Goethe, Dickens, Schiller, and Scott. 

Goethe was a believer in the pleasant doc- 
trine that the highest and freest work can be 
done under the healthiest conditions of fresh 
air, early hours, daylight, and temperance — 
which does not mean abstinence. He and 
Balzac are at precisely opposite pales in their 
method of working. Here is the account of 
Goethe's days at Weimar, according to G. H. 
Lewes : He rose at seven. Till eleven he 
worked without interruption. A cup of choco- 
late was then brought, and he worked on again 
till one. At two he dined. His appetite was 
immense. Even on the days when he com- 
plained of not being hungry, he ate much more 
than most men. He sat a long while over his 
wine, chatting gayly ; for he never dined alone. 
He was fond of wine, and drank daily his two 
or three bottles. There was no dessert — Bal- 
zac's principal meal — nor coffee. Then he 
went to the theatre, where a glass of punch was 
brought to him at six, or else he received 
friends at home. By ten o'clock he was in bed, 
where he slept soundly. Like Thorwaldsen, he 
had a talent for sleeping. 

No man of business or dictionary maker 

8 



122 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

could make a more healthy arrangement of his 
hours. The five or six hours of regular morn- 
ing work, which left the rest of the day open 
for society and recreation, the early habits, the 
full allowance of sleep, and the rational use of 
food are in glaring contrast to Balzac's short 
and broken slumbers, his night work, and his 
bodily starvation. Goethe differed from almost 
every other great poet in not doing his greatest 
work at a white heat ; and not only so, but he 
differed also in constantly balancing his reason- 
ing against his creative faculties. Those long 
mornings of early work were not always spent 
in the fever of creation. He was a physiolo- 
gist, a botanist, a critic ; and the longer he 
lived, the more of a savant he became, if not less 
of a poet. His imagi nation was most fertile 
before he settled down into these regular ways, 
but not before he settled down into a full appre- 
ciation of wine. Balzac would write the draft 
of a whole novel at a sitting, and then develop 
it on the margins of proofs, revises, and re- 
revises. Goethe acted as if while art is long, 
life were long also. Till the contrary is proved, 
we must consistently hold that Goethe was 
the philosopher before dinner-time, and the 
poet in the theatre, or during those long after- 
dinner hours over his two or three bottles of 
wine. That these later hours were often spent 
socially proves nothing, one way or the other. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 23 

Some men need such active influences as their 
form of mental stimulus. Alfieri found, or 
made, his ideas while listening to music or gal- 
loping on horseback. Instances are common 
in every-day life of men who cannot think to 
good purpose when shut up in a room with a 
pen, and who find their best inspiration in wan- 
dering about the streets and hearing what they 
want in the rattle of cabs and the seething of 
life around them, like the scholar of Padua, 
whose conditions of work are given by Mon- 
taigne as a curiosity : " I lately found one of the 
most learned men in France studying in the 
corner of a room, cut off by a screen, sur- 
rounded by a lot of riotous servants. He told 
me — and Seneca says much the same himself 
— that he worked all the better for this uproar, 
as, if overpowered by noise, he was obliged to 
withdraw all the more closely into himself for 
contemplation, while the storm of voices drove 
his thoughts inward. When at Padua he had 
lodged so long over the clattering of the traffic 
and the tumult of the streets, that he had been 
trained not only to be indifferent to noise, but 
even to require it for the prosecution of his 
studies." 

Goethe abominated smoking, though he was 
a German. Bayard Taylor says that he toler- 
ated the use of the pipe by Schiller and his 
sovereign, Carl August, but otherwise he was 



124 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

very severe in denouncing it. Goethe himself 
somewhere says that " with tobacco, garlic, 
bed-bugs, and hypocrites he should wage per- 
petual war." 

We learn from Mr. Forster that " method in 
everything was Dickens' peculiarity, and be- 
tween breakfast and luncheon, with rare excep- 
tions, was his time of work. But his daily 
walks were less of rule than of enjoyment and 
necessity. In the midst of his writing they 
were indispensable, and especially, as it has 
been shown, at night." When he had work on 
hand he walked all over the town furiously, and 
in all weathers,- to the injury of his health ; and 
his walks, be it observed, were frequently what 
Balzac's always were — at night; so that, in the 
matter of hours, he must be taken as having 
conformed in some important respects to Bal- 
zac's hygiene. Now, Goethe was also an essen- 
tially out-of-doors man by nature — not one to 
let his pen do his imagining for him. He was 
no slave of the ink-bottle, as some are, who can- 
not think without the feather of a goose in their 
hauds, by way of a sometimes appropriate talis- 
man. There is a well-known passage in one of 
the Roman elegies to the effect that inspiration 
is to be sought more directly than within the 
four walls of a study, and that the rhythm of the 
hexameter is not best drummed with the fingers 
on a wooden table ; and if it is true, as the 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 25 

author tells, that " youth is drunkenness with- 
out wine," it seems to follow, according to his 
experience, that those two or three bottles of 
wine are not altogether needless as an aid to 
inspiration when youth is gone by. 

Schiller could never leave off talking about 
his poetical projects, and thus he discussed 
with Goethe all his best pieces, scene after 
scene. On the other hand, it was contrary to 
Goethe's nature, as he told Eckermann, to talk 
over his poetic plans with anybody — even with 
Schiller. He carried everything about with 
him in silence, and usually nothing of what he 
was doing was known to any one until the 
whole was completed. 

Sir Walter Scott was one of the most indus- 
trious of writers. He rose early, and accom- 
plished a good day's literary work before half 
the world was out of bed. Even when he was 
busiest, he seldom worked as late as noon. His 
romances were composed with amazing rap- 
idity; and it is an astonishing fact, that in less 
than two weeks after his bankruptcy Scott 
wrote an entire volume of " Woodstock." His 
literary labors yielded him $50,000 a year. 
Two thousand copies of " The Lady of the 
Lake " were sold within a few months. 

Many of the more energetic descriptions in 
" Marmion," and particularly that of the battle 
of Flodden, were struck off, according to Mr, 



.£26 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

Skene's account, while Scott was out with his 
cavalry, in the autumn of 1807. In the inter- 
vals of drilling, we are told, Scott used to de- 
light " in walking his powerful black steed up 
and down by himself upon the Portobello sands, 
within the beating of the surge ; and now and 
then you would see him plunge in his spurs, 
and go off as if at the charge, with the spray 
dashing about him. As we rode back to Mus- 
selburgh, he often came and placed himself 
beside me, to repeat the verses that he had 
been composing during these pauses of our 
exercise." 

In after years, Mr. Cadell, then a guest at 
Abbotsford, observing how his host was har- 
rassed by lion-hunters, and what a number of 
hours he spent daily in the company of his 
work-people, expressed his wonder that Scott 
should ever be able to work at all while in the 
country. "Oh," said Sir Walter, " I lie simmer- 
ing over things for an hour or so before I get 
up ; and there's the time I'm dressing to over- 
haul my half-sleeping, half-waking ftrojet de 
chapitre, and when I get the paper before me, 
it commonly runs off pretty easily. Besides, I 
often take a doze in the plantations, and while 
Tom [ Purdie ] marks out a dyke or a drain as I 
have directed, one's fancy may be running its 
ain rigs in some other world." 
. By far the greater portion of " The Bride of 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 127 

Lammermoor," the whole of " The Legend of 
Montrose," and almost the whole of " Ivanhoe " 
were dictated under the terrible stimulus of 
physical pain, which wrung groans from the 
author between the words. The very two 
novels wherein the creative power of the arch- 
master of romance shows itself most strongly 
were composed in the midst of literal birth- 
throes. Laidlaw would often beseech Sir 
Walter affectionately to stop dictating, when 
his audible suffering filled every pause. It was 
then he made that grimmest of all bad puns : 
"Nay, Willie," addressing Laidlaw, who wrote 
for him and implored him to rest, " only see 
that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all 
the cry, as well as all the wool, to ourselves ; but 
as to giving over work, that can be done only 
when I am in woollen." John Ballantyne, his 
other faithful amanuensis, after the first day, 
took care to have always a dozen of pens made 
before he seated himself opposite the sofa on 
which Scott lay, the sufferer usually continuing 
his sentence in the same breath, though he 
often turned himself on his pillow with a groan 
of anguish. " But when a dialogue of peculiar 
animation was in progress, spirit seemed to tri- 
umph altogether over matter : he arose from 
his couch and walked up and down the room, 
raising and lowering his voice, and, as it were, 
acting the parts." 



128 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

In this last particular we are reminded of the 
celebrated Russian author, Gogol, whose prac- 
tice it is said to have been in composing a dia- 
logue to recite all the different speeches in char- 
acter before committing them to paper, to 
assure himself of their being in complete con- 
sonance with what the character and situation 
required. 

So far from affording any argument to the 
contrary, the history of the years during which 
Sir Walter's hand was losing its cunning seems 
to illustrate the penalty of trying to reconcile 
two irreconcilable things — the exercise of the 
imagination to its fullest extent, and the observ- 
ance of conditions that are too healthy to nour- 
ish a fever. Apropos of his review of Ritson's 
" Caledonian Annals," he himself says : " No 
one that has not labored as I have done on imag- 
inary topics can judge of the comfort afforded by 
walking on all-fours, and being grave and dull." 
There spoke the man who habitually, and with- 
out artificial help, drew upon hia imagination at 
the hours when instinct has told others they 
should be employing, not their fancy, but their 
reason. The privilege of being healthily dull 
before breakfast must have been an intense re- 
lief to one who compelled himself to do un- 
healthy or abnormal work without the congenial 
help of abnormal conditions. Herder, in like 
manner, is accused by De Quincey, in direct 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 120, 

terms, of having broken down prematurely be- 
cause he "led a life of most exemplary temper- 
ance. Surely, if he had been a drunkard or an 
opium-eater, he might have contrived to weather 
the point of sixty years." This is putting things 
pretty strongly; but it is said of a man of great 
imaginative power by a man of great imagi- 
native power, and may, therefore, be taken 
as the opinion of an expert, all the more honest 
because he is prejudiced. A need must be 
strongly felt to be expressed with such daring 
contempt for popular axioms. 

The true working-life of Scott, who helped 
nature by no artificial means, lasted for no 
more than twelve years, from the publication of 
" Waverley " until the year in which his genius 
was put into harness ; so that, of the two men, 
Scott and Balzac, who both began a literary 
life at nearly the same age, and were both 
remarkable for splendid constitutions, the 
man who lived abnormally surpassed the man 
who lived healthily by fully eight years of 
good work, and kept his imagination in full 
vigor to the end. 

It is amusing to read Sir Walter's candid 
avowal, when beginning the third volume of 
"Woodstock," that he " had not the slightest 
idea how the story was to be wound up to a 
catastrophe." He declares he never could lay 
down a plan — or that, if he had laid one down, he 



130 METHODS OF AUTHORS. • 

never could stick to it. " I tried only to make 
that which I was writing diverting and interest- 
ing, leaving the rest to fate. This habnab at a 
venture is a perilous style, I grant, but I can- 
not help it." 



VIII. 

Burning Midnight Oil. 

That night, and not morning, is most appropri- 
ate to imaginative work is supported by a gen- 
eral consent among those who have followed in- 
stinct in this matter. Upon this question, 
which can scarcely be called vexed, Charles 
Lamb is the classical authority : " No true 
poem ever owed its birth to the sun's light. 
The mild, internal light, that reveals the fine 
shapings of poetry, like fires on the domestic 
hearth, goes out in the sunshine. Milton's 
* Morning Hymn in Paradise,' we would hold 
a good wager, was penned at midnight, and 
Taylor's rich description of a sunrise smells de- 
cidedly of a taper." " This view of evening 
and candle-light," to quote his commentator, 
De Quincey, once more, " as involved in the 
full delight of literature," may seem no more 
than a pleasant extravaganza, and no doubt it is 
in the nature of such gayeties to travel a little 
into exaggeration ; but substantially it is certain 
that Lamb's sincere feelings pointed habitually 
in the direction here indicated. His literary 
studies, whether taking the color of tasks or 
diversions, courted the aid of evening, which, by 
means of physical weariness, produces a more 



132 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

luxurious state of repose than belongs to the 
labor hours of day; they courted the aid of 
lamp-light, which, as Lord Bacon remarked, 
" gives a gorgeousness to human pomps and 
pleasures, such as would be vainly sought from 
the homeliness of day-light." Those words, 
"physical weariness," if they do not contain 
the whole philosophy of the matter, are very 
near it, and are, at all events, more to the point 
than the quotation from Lord Bacon. They 
almost exactly define that unnatural condition 
of the body which, on other grounds, appears 
to be proper to the unnatural exercise of the 
mind. It will be remembered that Balzac rec- 
ommended the night for the artist's work, the 
day for the author's drudgery. Southey, who 
knew as well as anybody who ever put pen to 
paper how to work, and how to get the best 
and the most out of himself, and who pursued 
the same daily routine through his whole liter- 
ary life, performed his tasks in the following 
order : From breakfast till dinner, history, tran- 
scription for the press, and, in general, all the 
work that Scott calls " walking on all-fours." 
From dinner till tea, reading, letter-writing, the 
newspapers, and frequently a siesta — he, also, 
was a heroic sleeper, and slept whenever he had 
the chance. After tea, poetry, or whatever else 
his fancy chose — whatever work called upon 
the creative power. It is true that he went to 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 33 

bed regularly at half-past ten, so that his actual 
consumption of midnight oil was not extrava- 
gant. But such of it as he did consume served 
as a stimulant for the purely imaginative part of 
his work, when the labor that required no stimu- 
lant was over and done. 

Blake was a painter by day and a poet 
by night ; he often got out of bed at mid- 
night and wrote for hours, following by 
instinct the deliberate practice of less im- 
pulsive workers. 

Schiller evolved his finest plays in a summer- 
house, which he built for himself, with a single 
chamber, on the top of an acclivity near Jena, 
commanding a beautiful prospect of the valley 
of the Saal and the fir mountains of the neigh- 
boring forest. On sitting down to his desk at 
night, says Doring, he was wont to keep 
some strong coffee or wine chocolate, but more 
frequently a flask of old Rhenish or cham- 
pagne, standing by him : often the neighbors 
would hear him earnestly declaiming in the 
silence of the night, and he might be seen walk- 
ing swiftly to and fro in his chamber, then sud- 
denly throwing himself down into his chair and 
writing, drinking at intervals from the glass that 
stood near him. In winter he continued at his 
desk till four, or even five, o'clock in the morning ; 
in summer, till toward three. The " pernicious 
expedient of stimulants " served only to waste 



134 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

the more speedily and surely, as Mr. Carlyle 
says, his already wasted fund of physical 
strength. Schiller used an artificial stimulus 
altogether peculiar to himself : he found it im- 
possible, according to the well-known anecdote, 
to work except in a room filled with the scent 
of rotten apples, which he kept in a drawer of 
his writing-table, in order to keep up his neces- 
sary mental atmosphere. 

In the park at Weimar we have other 
glimpses of Schiller; frequently he was to be 
seen there, wandering among the groves and 
remote avenues, — for he loved solitary walks, — 
with a note-book in his hand; now loitering 
along, now moving rapidly on ; " if any one ap- 
peared in sight, he would dart into another 
alley, that his dream might not be broken." In 
Joerden's Lexicon we read that whatever 
Schiller intended to write, he first composed in 
his head, before putting down a line of it on 
paper; and he used to call a work "ready" so 
soon as its existence in his spirit was complete : 
hence, there were often reports current of his 
having finished such and such a work, when, in 
the common sense, it was not even begun. 

Lord Byron was a late riser. He often saw 
the sun rise before he went to bed. In his 
journals we frequently find such entries as 
these : " Got up at two P. M., spent the morn- 
ing," etc. He always wrote at night. While 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 35 

he was the most brilliant star in London society, 
he was in the habit of returning from balls, 
routs, the theatre, and opera, and then writing 
for two or three hours before going to bed. 
In this way "The Corsair," "Lara," "The 
Giaour," and -"The Siege of Corinth" were 
composed. Byron affords an illustration of a 
tendency to put himself out of working condi- 
tion in order to work the better. "At Di£dati," 
says Moore, " his life was passed in the same 
regular round of habits into which he naturally 
fell." These habits included very late hours 
and semi-starvation, the excessive smoking of 
cigars and chewing of tobacco, and the drink- 
ing of green tea, without milk or sugar, in the 
evening. Like Balzac, Byron avoided meat 
and wine, and so gave less natural brain-food 
room for active play. 

The experience of P. K. Rosegger, the great- 
est novelist of Styria, whose popular works are 
read not only in the palace, but also in the hut, 
is contrary to that of most writers ; he finds 
that with him lamp-light and night-work are 
most conducive to literary fertility, and that he 
can work with greater ease on dark, gloomy 
days than in fine weather. His manuscripts 
are generally committed to the press as they 
were originally composed, except for additions 
that fill the margins which the author leaves for 
that purpose when writing. Poetry comes to 



9> 



I36 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

him spontaneously when he takes his exercise 
in the field or garden, so that all he has to do 
when he gets home is to write it down ; but he 
can compose prose only at the writing-desk. 
After a rest of several days he writes with great 
ease and velocity ; in fact, writing is a necessity 
to him. On the average, he writes three hours 
a day. He is often forced to write while disin- 
clined, to provide . for the maintenance of a 
large family. 

George Parsons Lathrop thus speaks of the 
habits of work of Dr. William A. Hammond, 
one of the more recent additions to our novel- 
writers : " Dr. Hammond's habits of work are 
something which should interest all brain 
laborers. At a moderately early hour in the 
morning he seats himself in his consulting-room 
to receive patients, and he remains indoors until 
two in the afternoon. Then he drives out and 
walks. On certain days he has medical lec- 
tures to deliver. His spare time in the after- 
noon is devoted to taking the air, reading, or 
diverting himself. After dinner and any social 
recreation that may be in hand he sits down at 
his desk again by ten or eleven o'clock, and 
writes until two in the morning. ' I do it,' he 
says, ; because I like it. It amuses and re- 
freshes me.' How he manages to endure this 
constant sitting up is something of a marvel, 
considering that so much of his energies must 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 137 

be consumed by professional work. He seems 
to be always at leisure and unharassed, and 
lives comfortably, not denying himself a reason- 
able portion of stimulants and tobacco." 



ix. 

Literary Partnership. 

Literary partnerships are common in France, 
but in England they are confined almost ex- 
clusively to dramatists. The one well-known 
exception was that of Messrs. Besant and Rice. 
Mr. Rice's partnership with Mr. Besant began 
in 1 871, and ended with the death of Mr. Rice. 
" It arose," explains Mr. Besant, " out of some 
slight articles which I contributed to his maga- 
zine, and began with the novel called ' Ready- 
Money Mortiboy.' Of this eleven years' fellow- 
ship and intimate, almost daily, intercourse, I 
can say only that it was carried on throughout 
without a single shadow of dispute or difference. 
James Rice was eminently a large-minded man, 
and things which might have proved great 
rocks of offence to some, he knew how to treat 
as the trifles they generally are." 

In France, the best example of literary part- 
nership is found in that of M. Erckmann and M. 
Chatrian. How these men worked in concert 
has been described by the author of " Men of 
the Third Republic." "M. Chatrian is credited 
with being the more imaginative of the two. 
The first outlines of the plots are generally his, 
as also the love scenes, and all the descriptions 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 139 

of Phalsbourg and the country around. M. 
Erckmann puts in the political reflections, fur- 
nishes the soldier types, and elaborates those 
plain speeches which fit so quaintly, but well, 
into the mouths of his honest peasants, ser- 
geants, watchmakers, and schoolmasters. A 
clever critic remarked that Erckmann-Chat- 
rian's characters are always hungry and eating. 
The blame, if any, must lie on M. Chatrian's 
shoulders ; to his fancy belong the steaming 
tureens of soup, the dishes of browned saus- 
ages and sauer-kraut, and the mounds of 
flowery potatoes, bursting plethorically through 
their skins. All that M. Erckmann adds to the 
mdnu is the black coffee, of which he insists, 
with some energy, on being a connoisseur. 
Habitually the co-authors meet to sketch out 
their plots and talk them over amid much to- 
bacco smoking. Then, when the story has 
taken clear shape in their minds, one or the 
other of the pair writes the first chapter, leaving 
blanks for the dialogues or descriptions which 
are best suited to the competency of the other. 
Every chapter thus passes through both 
writers' hands, is revised, recopied, and, as oc- 
casion requires, either shortened or lengthened 
in the process. When the whole book is writ- 
ten, both authors revise it again, and always 
with a view to curtailment. Novelists who 
dash off six volumes of diluted fiction in a year, 



140 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

and affect to think naught of the feat, would 
grow pensive at seeing the labor bestowed by 
MM. Erckmann and Chatrian on the least of 
their works, as well as their patient research in 
assuring themselves that their historical epi- 
sodes are correct, and their descriptions of ex- 
isting localities true to nature. But this care- 
ful industry will have its reward, for the novels 
of MM. Erckmann and Chatrian will live. 
The signs of vitality were discovered in them 
as soon as the two authors, nerved by their first 
success, settled down and produced one tale 
after another, all too slowly for the public de- 
mand. ' The Story of a Conscript,' * Water- 
loo,' 'The History of a Man of the People,' and, 
above all, 'The History of a Peasant,' were 
read with wonder as well as interest." 



X. 

Anonymity in Authorship. 

The question of the authorship of certain 
popular works has given rise to a great deal of 
speculation. A few years ago, it will be 
remembered, we were puzzling our brains to 
discover the name of the author of " The 
Breadwinners." Among other stinging charges 
against him, to induce him to break the silence, 
was the fling that it was a base and craven thing 
to publish a book anonymously. u My motive 
in withholding my name is simple enough," 
said the unknown author to his furious critics. 
" I am engaged in business in which my stand- 
ing would be seriously compromised were it 
known that I had written a novel. I am sure 
that my practical efficiency is not lessened by 
this act, but I am equally sure that I could 
never recover from the injury it would occasion 
me if known among my own colleagues. For 
that positive reason, and for the negative one 
that I do not care for publicity, I resolved to 
keep the knowledge of my little venture in 
authorship restricted to as small a circle as pos- 
sible. Only two persons besides myself know 
who wrote * The Breadwinners. ' " 

A far more serious dispute followed the pub- 



142 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

lication of the "Vestiges of Creation," forty 
years ago. The theologians of Scotland were 
wild with rage at the audacity of the author, 
who would have been torn to pieces almost 
had he been discovered. In scientific circles 
Robert Chambers was credited with the 
authorship ; and Henri Greville seems to have 
had no doubt upon the matter. In " Leaves 
from the Diary of Henri Greville " there is an 
entry under the date December 28, 1847, as 
follows : " I have been reading a novel called 
4 Jane Eyre,' which is just now making a great 
sensation, and which absorbed and interested 
me more than any novel I can recollect having 
read. The author is unknown. Mrs. Butler, — 
Miss Fannie Kemble, — who is greatly struck 
by the talent of the book, fancies it is written 
by Chambers, who is the author of the ' Vestiges 
of Creation,' because she thinks that whoever 
wrote it must, from its language, be a Scotch- 
man, and from its sentiments be a Unitarian ; 
and Chambers, besides answering to all these 
peculiarities, has an intimate friend who believes 
in supernatural agencies, such as are described 
in the last volume of the book." Thackeray 
also had the credit of the work. 

Nobody knew Charlotte Bronte ; but she was 
unable to keep her secret very long. The late 
R. H. Home was present at that first dinner 
party given by George Smith, the publisher, 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 43 

when Currer Bell, then in the first flush of her 
fame, made her earliest appearance in a London 
dining-room. She was anxious to preserve the 
anonymity of her literary character, and was 
introduced by her true name. Home, however, 
who sat next to her, was so fortunate as to 
discover her identity. Just previously he had 
sent to the new author, under cover of her 
publisher, a copy of his " Orion." In an un- 
guarded moment, Charlotte Bronte turned to 
him and said : — 

" I was so much obliged to you, Mr. Home, 
for sending me your — " But she checked her- 
self with an inward start, having thus betrayed 
her Currer Bell secret, by identifying herself 
with the author of "Jane Eyre." 

" Ah, Miss Bronte," whispered the innocent 
cause of the misfortune, "you would never do 
for treasons and stratagems ! " 

The late John Blackwood corresponded with 
George Eliot for some time before he knew 
that she was a woman. He called her " Dear 
George," he says, and often used expressions 
which a man commonly uses only to a man. 
After he found out who " Dear George "was, he 
was naturally a little anxious to recall some of 
the expressions he had used. Charles Dickens, 
however, detected what escaped the observation 
of most people. Writing to a correspondent in 
January, 1858, he said: "Will you. by such 



144 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

roundabout ways and methods as may present 
themselves, convey this note of thanks to the 
author of ' Scenes of Clerical Life/ whose two 
first stories I can never say enough of, I think 
them so truly admirable. But, if those two 
volumes, or a part of them, were not written by 
a woman, then shall I begin to believe that I am 
a woman myself." 



XI. 

System in Novel Writing. 

Anthony Trollope was the most systematic of 
all the English novelists. Sitting down at his 
desk, he would take out his watch and time him- 
self. His system is well known, but a singular 
explanation of his fertility may be quoted: 
"When I have commenced a new book," he 
says, " I have always prepared a diary divided 
into weeks, and carried it on for the period 
which I have allowed myself for the completion 
of the work. In this I have entered day by day 
the number of pages I have written, so that if 
at any time I have slipped into idleness for a 
day or two, the record of that idleness has been 
there staring me in the face and demanding of 
me increased labor, so that the deficiency might 
be supplied. According to the circumstances 
of the time, whether any other business might 
be then heavy or light, or whether the book 
which I was writing was or was not wanted 
with speed, I have allotted myself so many 
pages a week. The average number has been 
about forty. It has been placed as low as 
twenty and has risen to one hundred and 
twelve. And as a page is an ambiguous term, 
my page has been made to contain two hundred 



I46 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

and fifty words, and as words, if not watched, 
will have a tendency to straggle, I have had 
every word counted as I went." 

Under the title of "A Walk in a Wood," 
Anthony Trollope thus describes his method of 
plot-making and the difficulty the novelist ex- 
periences in making the " tricksy Ariel " of the 
imagination do his bidding : " I have to confess 
that my incidents are fabricated to fit my story 
as it goes on, and not my story to fit my inci- 
dents. I wrote a novel once in which a lady 
forged a will, but I had not myself decided that 
she had forged it till the chapter before that in 
which she confesses her guilt. In another a 
lady is made to steal her own diamonds, a 
grand tour de force, as I thought ; but the bril- 
liant idea struck me only when I was writing 
the page in which the theft is described. I 
once heard an unknown critic abuse my work- 
manship because a certain lady had been made 
to appear too frequently in my pages. I went 
home and killed her immediately. I say this to 
show that the process of thinking to which I 
am alluding has not generally been applied to 
any great effort of construction. It has ex- 
pended itself on the minute ramificatiSns of tale- 
telling: how this young lady should be made to 
behave herself with that young gentleman; how 
this mother or that father would be affected by 
the ill conduct or the good" of a son or a daughter ; 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. I47 

how these words or those other would be most 
appropriate or true to nature if used on some 
special occasion. Such plottings as these with 
a fabricator of fiction are infinite in number, 
but not one of them can be done fitly without 
thinking. My little effort will miss its wished- 
for result unless I be true to nature ; and to be 
true to nature I must think what nature would 
produce. Where shall I go to find my thoughts 
with the greatest ease and most perfect freedom ? 
" I have found that I can best command my 
thoughts on foot, and can do so with the most 
perfect mastery when wandering through a wood. 
To be alone is, of course, essential. Companion- 
ship requires conversation, for which, indeed, 
the spot is most fit ; but conversation is not now 
the object in view. I have found it best even to 
reject the society of a dog, who, if he be a dog 
of manners, will make some attempt at talking ; 
and though he should be silent, the sight of him 
provokes words and caresses and sport. It 
is best to be away from cottages, away from 
children, away as far as may be from chance 
wanderers. So much easier is it to speak than 
to think, that any slightest temptation suffices to 
carry away the idler from the harder to the 
lighter work. An old woman with a bundle of 
sticks becomes an agreeable companion, or a 
little girl picking wild fruit. Even when quite 
alone, when all the surroundings seem to be 



148 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

fitted for thought, the thinker will still find a 
difficulty in thinking. It is not that the mind 
is inactive, but that it will run exactly whither 
it is not bidden to go. With subtle ingenuity, 
it will find for itself little easy tasks, instead of 
setting itself down on that which it is its duty 
to do at once. With me, I own, it is so weak as 
to fly back to things already done, which re- 
quire no more thinking, which are, perhaps, un- 
worthy of a place even in the memory, and to 
revel in the ease of contemplating that which 
has been accomplished, rather than to struggle 
for further performance. My eyes, which 
should become moist with the troubles of the 
embryo heroine, shed tears as they call to mind 

the early sorrow of Mr. , who was married 

and made happy many years ago. Then, when 
it comes to this, a great effort becomes neces- 
sary, or that day will for me have no results. 
It is so easy to lose an hour in maundering over 
the past, and to waste the good things which 
have been provided in remembering instead of 
creating ! 

" But a word about the nature of the wood ! 
It is not always easy to find a wood, and some- 
times when you have got it, it is but a muddy 
plashy, rough-hewn congregation of ill-grown 
trees, — a thicket rather than a wood, — in 
which even contemplation is difficult, and think- 
ing is out of the question. He who has devoted 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 49 

himself to wandering in woods will know at the 
first glance whether the place will suit his pur- 
pose. A crowded undergrowth of hazel, thorn, 
birch, and elder, with merely a track through it, 
will by no means serve the occasion. The trees 
around you should be big and noble. There 
should be grass at your feet. There should be 
space for the felled or fallen princes of the 
forest. A roadway with the sign of wheels 
that have passed long since will be an advan- 
tage, so long as the branches above your head 
shall meet or seem to meet each other. I will 
not say that the ground should not be level, lest 
by creating difficulties I shall seem to show 
that the fitting spot may be too difficult to be 
found ; but, no doubt, it will be an assistance in 
the work to be done if occasionally you can 
look down on the tops of the trees as you de- 
scend, and again look up to them as with in- 
creasing height they rise high above your head. 
And it should be a wood — perhaps a forest — 
rather than a skirting of timber. You should 
feel that, if not lost, you are losable. To have 
trees around you is not enough, unless you have 
many. You must have a feeling as of Adam in 
the garden. There must be a confirmed assur- 
ance in your mind that you have got out of the 
conventional into the natural, which will not 
establish itself unless there be a consciousness 
of distance between you and the next ploughed 



150 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

field. If possible, you should not know the 
east from the west ; or, if so, only by the set- 
ting of the sun. You should recognize the di- 
rection in which you must return simply by the 
fall of water. 

" But where shall the wood be found ? Such 
woodlands there are still in England, though, 
alas ! they are becoming rarer every year. 
Profit from the timber merchant or dealer in 
fire-wood is looked to ; or else, as is more 
probable, drives are cut broad and straight, like 
spokes of a wheel radiating to a nave or centre, 
good only for the purposes of the slayer of 
multitudinous pheasants. I will not say that a 
wood prepared, not as the home, but the 
slaughter-ground, of game, is altogether ineffi- 
cient for our purpose. I have used such, even 
when the sound of the guns has been near 
enough to warn me to turn my steps to the 
right or to the left. The scents are pleasant 
even in winter; the trees are there, and some- 
times even yet the delightful feeling may be 
encountered that the track on which you are 
walking leads to some far-off, vague destination, 
in reaching which there may be much of de- 
light, because it will be new ; — something also 
of peril, because it will be distant. But the 
wood, if possible, should seem to be purpose- 
less. It should have no evident consciousness 
of being there, either for game or fagots. The 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 151 

felled trunk on which you sit should seem to 
have been selected for some accidental purpose 
of house-building, as if a neighbor had 
searched for what was wanting and had found 
it. No idea should be engendered that it was 
let out at so much an acre to a contractor, who 
would cut the trees in order and sell them in 
the next market. The mind should conceive 
that this wood never had been planted by hands, 
but had come there from the direct beneficence 
of the Creator — as the first woods did come, 
before man had been taught to recreate them 
systematically, and as some still remain to us, 
so much more lovely in their wildness than when 
reduced to rows and quincunxes, and made to 
accommodate themselves to laws of economy 
and order. 

" They will not come at once, those thoughts 
which are so anxiously expected ; and in the 
process of coming they are apt to be trouble- 
some, full of tricks, and almost traitorous. 
They must be imprisoned or bound with 
thongs when they come, as was Proteus when 
Ulysses caught him amidst his sea-calves, — as 
wis done with some of the fairies of old, who 
would, indeed, do their beneficent work, but 
only under compulsion. It may be that your 
spirit should on an occasion be as obedient as 
Ariel ; but that will not be often. He will run 
backward, — as it were downhill, — because it is 



152 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

so easy, instead of upward and onward. He will 
turn to the right and to the left, making a show 
of doing fine work, only not the work that is 
demanded of him that day. He will skip 
hither and thither with pleasant, bright gambols, 
but will not put his shoulder to the wheel, his 
neck to the collar, his hand to the plough. Has 
my reader ever driven a pig to market ? The 
pig will travel on freely, but will always take 
the wrong turning ; and then, when stopped for 
the tenth time, will head backward and try to 
run between your legs So it is with the 
tricksy Ariel, — that Ariel which every man owns, 
though so many of us fail to use him for much 
purpose ; which but few of us have subjected 
to such discipline as Prospero had used before 
he had brought his servant to do his bidding at 
the slightest word. 

"But at last I feel that I have him, perhaps 
by the tail, as the Irishman drives his pig. 
When I have got him I have to be careful that 
he shall not escape me till that job of work be 
done. Gradually, as I walk or stop, as I seat 
myself on a bank or lean against a tree, perhaps 
as I hurry on waving my stick above my head, 
till, with my quick motion, the sweatdrops come 
out upon my brow, the scene forms itself for 
me. I see, or fancy that I see, what will be fit- 
ting, what will be true, how far virtue may be 
made to go without walking upon stilts, what 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 53 

wickedness may do without breaking the link 
which binds it to humanity, how low ignorance 
may grovel, how high knowledge may soar, what 
the writer may teach without repelling by 
severity, how he may amuse without descending 
to buffoonery ; and then the limits of pathos are 
searched and words are weighed which shall suit, 
but do no more than suit, the greatness or the 
smallness of the occasion. We, who are slight, 
may not attempt lofty things, or make ridicu- 
lous with our little fables the doings of the gods. 
But for that which we do there are appropriate 
terms and boundaries which may be reached, 
but not surpassed. All this has to be thought 
of and decided upon in reference to those little 
plottings of which I have spoken, each of which 
has to be made the receptacle of pathos or of 
humor, of honor or of truth, as far as the thinker 
may be able to furnish them. He has to see, 
above all things, that in his attempts he shall 
not sin against nature ; that in striving to touch 
the feelings he shall not excite ridicule ; that in 
seeking for humor he does not miss his point ; 
that in quest of honor and truth he does not 
become bombastic and straitlaced. A cler- 
gyman in his pulpit may advocate an altitude of 
virtue fitted to a millennium here or to a heaven 
hereafter ; nay, from the nature of his profes- 
sion, he must do so. The poet, too, may soar 
as high as he will, and if words suffice to him, 



154 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

he need never fear to fail because his ideas are 
too lofty. But he who tells tales in prose can 
hardly hope to be effective as a teacher, unless 
he binds himself by the circumstances of the 
world which he finds around him. Honor and 
truth there should be, and pathos and humor, 
but he should so constrain them that they shall 
not seem to mount into nature beyond the ordi- 
nary habitations of men and women. 

" Such rules as to construction have probably 
been long known to him. It is not for them he 
is seeking as he is roaming listlessly or walking 
rapidly through the trees. They have come to 
him from much observation, from the writings 
of others, from that which we call study," in 
which imagination has but little immediate 
concern. It is the fitting of the rules to the 
characters which he has created, the filling in 
with living touches and true colors those daubs 
and blotches on his canvas which have been 
easily scribbled with a rough hand, that the 
true work consists. It is here that he requires 
that his fancy should be undisturbed, that the 
trees should overshadow him, that the birds 
should comfort him, that the green and yellow 
mosses should be in unison with him, that the 
very air should be good to him. The rules are 
there fixed, — fixed as far as his judgment can 
fix them, — and are no longer a difficulty to him. 
The first coarse outlines of his story he has 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 55 

found to be a matter almost indifferent to him. 
It is with these little plottings that he has to con- 
tend. It is for them that he must catch his 
Ariel and bind him fast, but yet so bind him 
that not a thread shall touch the easy action of 
his wings. Every little scene must be arranged 
so that — if it may be possible — the proper 
words may be spoken and the fitting effect pro- 
duced. 

" Alas ! with all these struggles, when the 
wood has been found, when all external things 
are propitious, when the very heavens have 
lent their aid, it is so often that it is impossible ! 
It is not only that your Ariel is untrained, but 
that the special Ariel which you may chance to 
own is no better than a rustic hobgoblin or a 
pease-blossom, or mustard seed at the best. 
You cannot get the pace of the racehorse from 
a farmyard colt, train him as you will. How 
often is one prompted to fling one's self down 
in despair, and, weeping between the branches, 
to declare that it is not that the thoughts will 
wander, it is not that the mind is treacherous ! 
That which it can do, it will do ; but the pace 
required from it should be fitted only for the 
farmyard. Nevertheless, before all be given 
up, let a walk in the wood be tried.' 7 

Much has been said about the quality of Mr. 
Trollope's work. There seems a consensus 
of opinion that it degenerated. " Mr. Trol- 



156 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

lope," says Mr. Freeman, " had certainly gone 
far to write himself out. His later work is far 
from being so good as his earlier. But, after 
all, his worst work is better than a great many 
other people's best; and considering the way 
in which it was done, it is wonderful that it was 
done at all. I, myself, know what fixed hours 
of work are, and their value ; but I could not 
undertake to write about William Rufus or 
Appius Claudius up to a certain moment on the 
clock, and to stop at that moment. I suppose 
it was from his habits of official business that Mr. 
Trollope learned to do it, and every man un- 
doubtedly knows best how to do his own work. 
Still, it is strange that works of imagination did 
not suffer by such a way of doing." 

James Payn said that Trollope injured his repu- 
tation by publishing his methods of writing. Like- 
wise, the Daily News, in referring to Alphonse 
Daudet's history of his own novels, doubted 
whether he acted wisely. As the editor said, 
"An effect of almost too elaborate art, a feeling 
that we are looking at a mosaic painfully made 
up of little pieces picked out of real life and 
fitted together, has often been present to the 
consciousness of M. Daudet's readers. That 
feeling is justified by his description of his 
creative efforts." 

M. Daudet's earlier works were light and 
humorous, like " Tartarin," or they were idyllic 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 57 

and full of Provencal scenery, the nature and 
the nightingales of M. Daudet's birthplace, the 
south. One night at the theatre, when watch- 
ing the splendid failure of an idyllic Provencal 
sort of play, M. Daudet made up his mind that 
he must give the public sterner stuff, and de- 
scribe the familiar Parisian scenery of streets 
and quais. This wise determination was the 
origin of his novels, " Jack," " Fromont jeune 
et Risler aine," and the rest. Up to that 
time, M. Daudet, M. Zola, M. Flaubert, and 
the brothers Goncourt had all been more or 
less unpopular authors. It is not long since 
they had a little club of the unsuccessful, and 
M. Daudet was the first of the company who 
began to blossom out into numerous editions. 

M. Daudet's secret as a novelist, as far as 
the secret is communicable, seems to be his 
wonderfully close study of actual life and his 
unscrupulousness in reproducing its details 
almost without disguise. He frankly confesses 
that not only the characters in his political 
novels, but those in his other works, are drawn 
straight from living persons. The scenery is 
all sketched from nature, M. Daudet describing 
the vast factories with which he was familiar 
when, at the age of sixteen, he began to earn 
his own living, or the interiors to which he was 
admitted by virtue of his position under a great 
man of the late imperial administration. Places 



158 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

about which he did not know much, and which 
needed to be introduced into his tales, M. 
Daudet visited with his note-book. 

M. Daudet's mode of work is, first, to see his 
plot and main incidents clearly, to arrive at a 
full understanding of his characters, then to map 
out his chapters, and then, he says, his fingers 
tingle to be at work. He writes rapidly, hand- 
ing each wet slip of paper to Madame Daudet 
for criticism and approval. There is no such 
sound criticism, he says, as that of this helpful 
collaborator, who withal is "so little a woman of 
letters." 

When a number of chapters are finished M. 
Daudet finds it well to begin publishing his 
novel in a journal. Thus he is obliged to finish 
within a certain date; he cannot go back to 
make alterations ; he cannot afford time to write 
a page a dozen times over, as a conscientious 
artist often wishes to do. 



XII. 
Traits of Musical Composers. 

A long chapter of instances might be penned 
on the habits of work of musical composers ; 
such as Gluck's habit of betaking himself with 
his harpsichord on a fine day into some grassy- 
field, where the ideas came to him as fast 
again as within doors. 

Handel, on the contrary, claims to have been 
inspired for his grandest compositions by the 
murmurous din of mighty London, — far from 
mighty as the London of George the Second 
may seem to those with whom the nineteenth 
century is waning. 

Sarti composed best in the sombre shadows 
of a dimly-lighted room. 

The Monsieur Le Maitre commemorated in 
Rousseau's autobiography typified a numerous 
section in Jiis constant recourse, en travail- 
lant dans son cabinet, to a bottle, which was 
replenished as often as emptied, and that was 
too often by a great deal. His servant, in pre- 
paring the room for him, would no more have 
thought of omitting son pot et son verre than 
his ruled paper, ink, pens, and violoncello ; 
and one serving did for these, — not so for 
the drink. 



l6o METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

The learned artist Haydn could not work 
except in court-dress, and used to declare that, 
if, when he sat down to his instrument, he had 
forgotten to put on a certain ring, he could not 
summon a single idea. How he managed to 
summon ideas before Frederick II. had given 
him the said ring we are not informed. 

Charles Dibdin's method of composition, or, 
rather, the absence of it, is illustrated in the 
story of his lamenting his lack of a new subject 
while under the hair-dresser's hand in a cloud 
of powder, at his rooms in the Strand, preparing 
for his night's "entertainment." The friend 
who was with him suggested various topics, 
but all of a sudden the jar of a ladder sounded 
against the lamp-iron, and Dibdin exclaimed, 
" The lamp-lighter, a good notion," and at once 
began humming and fingering on his knee. As 
soon as his head was dressed he stepped to the 
piano, finished off both music and words, and 
that very night sang "Jolly Dick, the Lamp- 
lighter," at the theatre, nor could he, we are 
assured on critical authority, well have made 
a greater hit if the song had been the delibe- 
rate work of two authors — one of the words, 
another of the air — and had taken weeks to 
finish it, and been elaborated-in studious leisure 
instead of the distraction of dressing-room din. 



XIII. 
The Hygiene of Writing. 

Edward Everett Hale gives the following de- 
scription of his mode of life, which at the 
safne time is full of advice to authors in gen- 
eral : — 

" The business of health for a literary man 
seems to me to depend largely upon sleep. He 
should have enough sleep, and should sleep 
well. He should avoid whatever injures sleep. 

" This means that the brain should not be 
excited or even worked hard for six hours 
before bedtime. Young men . can disregard 
this rule, and do ; but as one grows older he 
finds it wiser to throw his work upon morning 
hours. If he can spend the afternoon, or even 
the evening, in the open air, his chances of sleep 
are better. The evening occupation, according 
to me, should be light and pleasant, as music, a 
novel, reading aloud, conversation, the theatre, 
or watching the stars from the piazza. Of 
course, different men make and need different 
rules. I take nine hours for sleep in every 
twenty-four, and do not object to ten. 

" I accepted very early in life Bulwer's esti- 
mate that three hours a day is as large an aver- 
age of desk work as a man of letters should try 



1 62 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

for. I have, in old newspaper days, written for 
twelve consecutive hours ; but this is only a 
tour de force, and in the long run you waste 
strength if you do not hold every day quite 
closely to the average. 

" As men live, with the telegraph and the 
telephone interrupting when they choose, and 
this fool and that coming in when they choose 
to say, ' I do not want to interrupt you ; I will 
only take a moment,' the great difficulty is to 
hold your three hours without a break. If a 
man has broken my mirror, I do not thank him 
for leaving the pieces next each other ; he has 
spoiled it, and he may carry them ten miles 
apart if he chooses. So, \i a fool comes in and 
breaks my time in two, he may stay if he wants 
to ; he is none the less a fool. What I want 
for work is unbroken time. This is best se- 
cured early in the morning. 

" I dislike early rising as much as any man, 
nor do I believe there is any moral merit in it, 
as the children's books pretend ; but to secure 
an unbroken hour, or even less, I like to be at 
my desk before breakfast. As long before as 
possible I have a cup of coffee and a soda bis 
cuit brought me there, and in the thirty to sixty 
minutes which follow before breakfast, I like to 
start the work of the day. If you rise at a 
quarter past six, there will be comparatively few 
map pedlers, or book agents, or secretaries of 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 63 

charities, or jailbirds, who will call before 
eight. The hour from 6.30 to 7.30 is that 
of which you are most sure. Even the mother- 
in-law or the mother of your wife's sister's hus- 
band does not come then to say that she should 
like some light work with a large salary as 
matron in an institution where there is nothing 
to do. 

;< I believe in breakfast very thoroughly, and 
in having a good breakfast. I have lived in 
Paris a month at a time and detest the French 
practice of substituting for breakfast a cup of 
coffee, with or without an egg. Breakfast is a 
meal at which much time may be spent with 
great advantage. People are not apt to come 
to it too regularly, and you may profit by the 
intermission to read your newspaper and lecture 
on its contents. There's no harm in spending 
an hour at the table. 

" After breakfast do not go to work for an 
hour. Walk out in the garden, lie on your back 
on a sofa and read, in general, 'loaf for that 
hour, and bid the servant keep out everybody 
who rings the bell, and work steadily till your 
day's stint is done. If you have had half an 
hour before breakfast, you can make two hours 
and a half now. 

" It is just so much help if you have a good 
amanuensis; none, if you have a poor one. The 
amanuensis should have enough else to do, but 



164 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

be at liberty to attend to you when you need. 
Write as long as you feel like writing; the 
moment you do not feel like it, give him the pen 
and walk up and down the room dictating. 
There are those who say that they can tell the dif- 
ference between dictated work and work written 
by the author. I do not believe them. I will 
give a share in the Combination Protoxide Sil- 
ver Mine of Grey's Gulch to anybody who will 
divide this article correctly between the parts 
which I dictated and those which are written 
with my own red right hand. 

" Stick to your stint tilUt is done. If Philis- 
tines come in, as they will in a finite world, deduct 
the time which they have stolen from you and 
go on so much longer with your work till you 
have done what you set out to do. 

" When you have finished the stint, stop. Do 
not be tempted to go on because you are in 
good spirits for work. There is no use in mak- 
ing ready to be tired to-morrow. You may go 
out of doors now, you may read, you may in 
whatever way get light and life for the next 
day. Indeed, if you will remember that the 
first necessity for literary work is that you have 
something ready to say before you begin, you 
will remember something which most authors 
have thoroughly forgotten or never knew. 

"This business of writing is the most ex- 
hausting known to men. You should, therefore, 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 65 

steadily feed the machine with fuel. I find it a 
good habit to have standing on the stove a cup 
of warm milk, just tinged in color with coffee. 
In the days of my buoyant youth I said, 'of the 
color of the cheek of a brunette in Seville.' I 
had then never seen a brunette in Seville ; but 
I have since, and I can testify that the descrip- 
tion was good. Beef tea answers as well; a 
bowl of chowder quite as well as either. In- 
deed, good clam chowder is probably the form 
of nourishment which most quickly and easily 
comes to the restoration or refreshment of the 
brain of man. 

" If this bowl of coffee, or chowder, or soup 
is counted as one meal, the working man who 
wishes to keep in order will have five meals a 
day, besides the morning cup of coffee, or of 
coffee colored with milk, which he .has before 
breakfast. Breakfast is one ; this extended 
lunch is another ; dinner is the third, say at 
half-past two ; tea is the fourth, at six or seven ; 
and, what is too apt to be forgotten, a sufficient 
supper before bedtime is the fifth. This last 
may be as light as you please, but let it be suffi- 
cient, — a few oysters, a slice of hot toast, clam 
chowder again, or a bowl of soup. Never go to 
bed in any danger of being hungry. People are 
kept awake by hunger quite as much as by a 
bad conscience. 

" Remembering that sleep is the essential 



1 66 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

force with which the whole scheme starts, de- 
cline tea or coffee within the last six hours 
before going to bed. If the women-kind insist, 
you may have your milk and water at the tea- 
table, colored with tea; but the less the better. 

" Avoid all mathematics or intricate study of 
any sort in the last six hours. This is the stuff 
dreams are made of, and hot heads, and the 
nuisances of waking hours. 

" Keep your conscience clear. Remember 
that because the work of life is infinite you 
cannot do the whole of it in any limited period 
of time, and that, therefore, you may just as 
well leave off in one place as another. 

" No work of any kind should be done in the,- 
hour after dinner. After any substantial meal/ 
observe, you need all your vital force for the 
beginning of digestion. For my part, I always 
go to sleep after dinner and sleep for exactly an 
hour, if people will only stay away ; and I am 
much more fond of the people who keep away 
from me at that time than I am of the people 
who visit me. " 



XIV. 
A Humorist's Regimen. 

Robert Barr ( whose pseudonym, " Luke 
Sharp," is familiar to the readers of the De- 
troit Free Press) has written an article on 
"How a Literary Man Should Live," which 
may be cited in conclusion : — 

11 1 am not," he says, " an advocate of early 
rising. I believe, however, that every literary 
man should have fixed hours for getting up. 
I am very firm with myself on that score. I 
make it a rule to rise every morning in winter 
between the hours of six and eleven, and in 
summer from half-past five until ten. A person 
is often tempted to sleep later than the limit I 
tie myself to, but a little resolution with a per- 
son's self at first will be amply repaid by the 
time thus gained, and the feeling one has of 
having conquered a tendency to indolence. I 
believe that a literary man can get all the sleep 
he needs between eight o'clock at night and 
eleven in the morning. I know, of course, that 
some eminent authorities disagree with me, but 
I am only stating my own experience in the 
matter, and don't propose to enter into any 
controversy about it. 

" On rising I avoid all stimulating drinks, 



1 68 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

such as tea or coffee. They are apt to set the 
brain working, and I object to work, even in its 
most disguised forms. A simple glass of hot 
Scotch, say half a pint or so, serves to tide over 
the period between getting up and breakfast- 
time. Many literary men work before break- 
fast, but this I regard as a very dangerous 
habit. I try to avoid it, and so far have been 
reasonably successful. I rest until breakfast- 
time. This gives the person a zest for the 
morning meal. 

" For breakfast the simplest food is the best. 
I begin with oyster stew, then some cold 
chicken, next a few small lamb chops and 
mashed potatoes, after that a good-sized beef- 
steak and fried potatoes, then a rasher of bacon 
with fried eggs ( three ), followed by a whitefish 
or two, the meal being completed with some 
light, wholesome pastry, mince pie for prefer- 
ence. Care should be taken to avoid tea or 
coffee, and I think a word of warning ought to 
go forth against milk. The devastation that 
milk has wrought among literary men is fearful 
to contemplate. They begin, thinking that if 
they find it is hurting them, they can break off, 
but too often before they awaken to their 
danger the habit has mastered them. I avoid 
anything at breakfast except a large tumbler of 
brandy, with a little soda water added to give it 
warmth and strength. 



METHODS OF AUTHORS. 1 69 

"No subject is of more importance to the 
literary aspirant than the dividing of the hours 
of work. I divide the hours just as minutely as 
I can, and then take as few of the particles as 
possible. I owe much of my success in life to 
the fact that I never allow work to interfere 
with the sacred time between breakfast and 
dinner. That is devoted to rest and thought. 
Much comfort can be realized during these 
hours by thinking what a stir you would make 
in the literary world if you could hire a man 
like Howells for five dollars a week to do your 
work for you. Such help, I find, is very diffi- 
cult to obtain, and yet some people hold that 
the labor market is overcrowded. The great 
task of the forenoon should be preparation for 
the mid-day meal. The thorough enjoyment of 
this meal has much to do with a man's success 
in this life. 

" Of course, I do not insist that a person 
should live like a hermit. Because he break- 
fasts frugally, that is no reason why he should 
not dine sumptuously. Some people dine at 
six and merely lunch at noon. Others have 
their principal meal in the middle of the day, 
and have a light supper. There is such merit 
in both these plans that I have adopted both. 
I take a big dinner and a light lunch at noon, 
and a heavy dinner and a simple supper in the 
evening. A person whose brain is constantly 



170 METHODS OF AUTHORS. 

worried about how he can shove off his work on 
somebody else has to have a substantial diet. 
The bill of fare for dinner should include every- 
thing that abounds in the market — that the 
literary man can get trusted for. 

" After a good rest when dinner is over, re- 
main quiet until supper-time, so that the brain 
will not be too much agitated for the trials that 
come after that meal. 

" I am a great believer in the old adage of 
* early to bed.' We are apt to slight the wisdom 
of our forefathers ; but they knew what they 
were about when they advised early hours. I 
always get to bed early, — say two or three 
in the morning. I do not believe in night 
work. It is rarely of a good quality. The 
brain is wearied with the exertions of the day 
and should not be overtaxed. Besides, the 
time can be put in with less irksomeness at the 
theatre, or in company with a lot of congenial 
companions who avoid the stimulating effects 
of tea, coffee, and milk. Tobacco, if used at 
all, should be sparingly indulged in. I never 
allow myself more than a dozen cigars a day ; 
although, of course, I. supplement this with a 
pipe. 

" When do I do my literary work ? Why, 
next day, of course." 



THE WRITER 

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WRITING FOR THE PRESS: 

A Manual for Editors, Reporters, Corre- 
spondents, and Printers. By Robert Luce. 
Fourth edition (seventh thousand); revised and 
greatly enlarged. 96 pp. Cloth, $1.00. 
" Writing for the Press" is a practical handbook of the art 
of newspaper writing, written by a practical newspaper man. 
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useful hint or suggestion about the proper preparation of news- 
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work is the result of the practical experience of the author as 
desk editor on the Boston Globe* and was written in the main 
from notes made while handling MS. there and elsewhere. 

Four editions of " Writing for the Press " have been required. 
For each edition the work has been revised and enlarged, so 
that it has grown from fortv-two to ninety-six pages, — yet, it 
is believed, without the addition of a useless sentence. New 
matter has been added partly to make the book more useful to 
newspaper writers, and partly to bring within its scope all 
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That literary workers of every class will find "Writing for 
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